School of War - Ep. 13: Thomas Clavin on Joe Moser

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

Journalist and author Thomas Clavin joins the show to discuss the harrowing journey of Joe Moser, an American fighter pilot during World War II and the subject of Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival.  Times 01:41 - Introduction  03:33 - Why a book on Joe Moser 09:44 - The Lockheed P-38 Lightning  11:09 - August 13, 1944 13:48 - Nazis send Moser to Buchenwald 15:44 - Buchenwald and the concentration camp system 17:48 - Karl-Otto and Ilse Koch 19:36 - Life at Buchenwald 21:34 - Colonel Phil Lamason 23:00 - Hannes Trautloft and Moser’s survival 27:27 - Leaving Buchenwald  31:47 - Joe after the war

When he came back from fighting in World War II, like a lot of guys who had seen action, Joe Moser didn't have a lot to say about what had happened over there. He had been in the thick of it, flying P-38 lightnings in combat over France in the critical year of 1944. And in August of that year, he got shot down and taken prisoner by the Germans. But there was something unusual about his story, something that, in addition to the usual reticence of that generation, kept him from speaking too freely about his experiences. One day back home after the war, he mentioned that during his captivity with the Nazis, he'd been a prisoner at Buchenwald.

Yes, that Buchenwald, the famous concentration camp. Moser wasn't Jewish or a member of any of the groups habitually targeted by the Nazi party, and so his observation was met with skepticism, and disapproval. This guy had to be making up stories. You can see why people would think that. Sounds fantastic on its face. An American fighter pilot sent to the camps, surviving narrowly alongside Holocaust victims in the close,

days of the war, people just found it hard to believe. And so, for most of his life, Joe Moser just stopped talking. But every word he said was true. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1921, a date which will live in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stay-on-ing. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean, and today we are delighted to welcome Tom Claven, journalist, author of numerous books, most recently Lightning Down, a World War II story of survival. Tom, thanks so much for joining us.

Well, thank you. Maybe we could start. So your most recent book is the story of a P-38 pilot in World War II. who's shot down over France and then has a harrowing time to say the least in captivity. And we'll get into all of that. But why don't you just tell us about yourself first? And we'll get to ultimately how you got interested in this story and Joe Moser. But you're a writer.

You've been writing about such like this for many years. Tell us how you got there. Well, I think the very first book that I did that was military-oriented was called Halsey's Typhoon. And that was a collaboration with my friend Bob Drury. since done, I think a total of seven books have been published. And our specialty as a team has been military history, American history. And I started to, before Bob and I began collaborating, I had done solo books. And even while Bob and I have been collaborating, I've done solo books, and I had the opportunity along the way to do a couple of others that were military-related,

one called Reckless, which is about a, some people think it's a novel, but it's actually a true story of a horse who was a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War. And actually, it was awarded a bronze star. And so I have, I wouldn't say that I made a deliberate decision. I was going to pursue military topics. It's just that after having done one or two, I found myself being more aware of what topics are out there. And also sometimes just stumbling across things, which is actually in the case of lightning down, I'd like to credit my great investigative skills, but I basically stumble on him. And who was Joe Moser? And how'd you stumble on him? A book that Bob Drury and I did that came out a few years ago called Lucky 666, was about a B-17 bomber crew in the Pacific in 1943. And I happen

to be doing some probably towards the end of the process, some last minute research for that on the internet. And I found just by chance, this obituary popped up. This was in December 2015 of a man named Joe Moser. He had just died at the age of 94. And, And his obituary was published in a weekly in the state of Washington, his community, Ferndale, Bellingham area. And I glanced at it as I am, you know, I do. I can't help reading things. And what jumped out at me was the line that he had been survived being incarcerated in Bupinval. And that was certainly unexpected.

I mean, I was not aware, as I think is true of most people, that were there Americans in Bupin, We thought that would be for gypsies and Jews and Russians and all the other people that the Nazis said were undesirable and they wanted them to get rid of them. So I began to do some research into that. I managed to contact the Moser family. I managed to do a little more research into it and discovered that it was not just an isolated case that Joe was one of 168 Allied pilots who were sent to Buchanwald and they were supposed to just disappear. but there was, I think, I found that there was a really, to me, fascinating story of survival. It took me, since that was December 2015 and the book was published in November, 2021. That's just under six years, and that was the amount of time it took to do the research.

And I did have to do a couple other projects in the interim, but I kept coming back to this book. It was called Lightning Down right from the beginning. I can't explain why other than the obvious fact that it's about a P38 Lightning that crashes and Joe's experience from that point on. So the story of Joe Moser, it's, you know, it's, on the one hand, it's, you know, this extraordinary, exceptional heroin tale. On the other hand, you know, it's kind of an ordinary story. He's an ordinary kid from an ordinary American family. Tell us a little bit about the Moser family and how they end up in America and how Joe grows up. You know, I'm glad you asked that question for two reasons. One, to give some background on Joe

Moser and two, I very deliberately, and I think one of the things that attracted me so much to Joe Moser is that he is in many ways representative of the ordinary young American male who by the thousands joined the Army and Navy and other military after Pearl Harbor. And yet his story took such a bizarre turn. I think it's more effective story because he was not terribly unique. But in Joe Moser's case, his father had come over from Switzerland, emigrated. and to Northwest Washington State, where apparently there was a number of other Swiss immigrants that he felt somewhat comfortable there.

And he began, got work on a farm, and he met Joe Moses' mother at a dance, a barn dance, and they got married rather quickly. And in fact, three months after they got married, Joe was born. And Joe always made the comment that one of the reasons why he was a bit of a short guy is that he only had a three-month gestation period. So Joe was had originally had three sisters and three younger sisters and a younger brother.

One of his sisters died as a childhood. Joe's father died when I think he was 11 or 12. So he basically became the head of the family. And he and his mother, widowed mother, ran the farm. And Joe, for no discernible reason, became fascinated by airplanes. be out in the field and there'd be airplanes flying overhead. And he just, you know, I had this idle dream. He said, boy, I'd like to be flying one of those airplanes someday, although more realistically thinking, I'm never going to leave this far. This is my life. But then came Pearl Harbor and he joined the army.

And he managed to fulfill that dream by becoming an Army Air Corps pilot. And a lot of training was involved. And it was finally in the spring of 1944 that his squadron was sent over overseas. They were first based in England. And then sometime after D-Day, they were able to move their base to unoccupied France. And Joe was on his 44th mission, and I should point out he was only 22 years old when he was shot down.

And just going back to something I was saying before, when I thought of Joe's story and how best to tell it, I kept thinking of the World War II movies of the 19th, 1940s where so often they were, you had like regular guys. You know, some of them were very cliched, okay, here's the Jewish guy for Brooklyn, here's the Italian guy, he's whatever. And so Joe's training period and everything leading up to when he finally gets to go overseas and fight the enemy, to me was reminiscent of those World War II movies where they show

somebody during basic training and training camp and the tough drill sergeant and all this kind of stuff. I saw a parallel between. So Joe's story, I think, was very typical of the young American soldier in World War II. It's just that his story couldn't have been more atypical. Yeah. You know, those cliches are cliches because they're rooted in reality. I remember actually reading when Spielberg did Saving Private Ryan. Yes.

He put a lot of thought and effort into recruiting actors who looked more ethnic than Americans do. Because that's how the troops would have looked. they would have been more, you know, obviously related to their sort of European sources of origin of their families. Right. That America in the, you know, 90s or 21st century. Well, certainly in Joe Moses's case, he, like many of the flyers he flew with and many who were in the military, they were the children of immigrants, you know, they were the most

grandchildren. You know, a lot of the big immigration waves that came over in the 1880s and 1890s, these were their children. So he grows up fascinated by airplanes, and that's, you know, for anyone who has little kids, not a totally uncommon thing. And then he gets fascinated by the P-38 lightning. What was the P-38 lightning? Tell us a bit about this plane that Joe falls in love with. Well, that was a unique plane. It was made by the Lockheed Corporation. And it was one of the special things about it was that, first of all, had a twin booms. And the Germans, when they first saw them, they called them the plane with two pilots. And they thought it was a light bomber because it was bigger.

It looked bigger than the normal fighter plane. And the P30 was sometimes used as a bomber. More often, though, as a fighter plane, I mean, Joe's early, certainly before D-Day, were mostly providing escorts to the B-17s, the Flying Fortresses on their missions. And after D-Day, more often the P-38s were being unleashed as fighter planes. hunters, you know, go find, if you could find some railroad cars, if you could find a artillery group, then go attack it. And that's, that was the mission that Joe is basically on. It was kind of like a fighter bomber mission that when Joe was shot down. Yeah, well, let's,

let's talk about that. So it's August of 1944. So, you know, Normandy is a few months, or D-Day, rather, is a few months prior. We've had the Battle of Normandy, which is now transitioning into this breakout period. And, you know, the Army's racing or about. out to race through France and liberate Paris. So it's, I guess the day in question is August the 13th, 1944. What happens to Joe on August the 13th? Well, Joe is the flight leader. He's one of four planes that are working together.

And he saw that there were, looked to be a collection of trucks that he assumed were either German trucks or helping the German operations somewhere. So he went in to attack them. and he realized too late that it was kind of a trap, that these were just decoy trucks, and he was hit by anti-edcraft fire, probably a combination of machine gun fire,

and his plane went down, and it didn't just go down. Joe's plane caught fire, and one of the drawbacks of the P-38 lightning is it was difficult to bail out from, and one of the problems is that you could bail out of the cockpit, and you're swept back to where the twin booms are and can get stuck on the,

on the connection between the twin booms. So what he basically did, I mean, he was hoping, he tried, he was hoping that he could last long enough to get back to the Allied lines, but his plane was burning up too rapidly. So he basically turned the plane upside down and allowed himself to fall. His boot was stuck for a while in the cockpit, but he managed to fall out. His plane crashed and exploded.

He landed in their farm field, and there were a bunch of French farmers there who tried to help him escape into a wooded air, area, but the Germans were there pretty quickly. He was captured, and he was first brought to be interrogated in a nearby town. He was next brought to outside of France, and that's where he first discovered that there were other pilots, other allied pilots, captured in this prison. You know, why weren't they all in a POW camp? And then the next morning, where they were put a couple thousand of people were put on this train that was leaving Paris and heading east toward Germany.

That's when they assumed, okay, and it was a terrible nightmare as train. I won't go into a lot of the disgusting details, but you had, you know, thousands of people packed into these cattle cars and one like five gallon bucket of water to share between them. And they were on five days and five nights, I believe it took. But they assumed that when they arrived and the cattle car doors were pulled open,

that they were going to be at a POW camp. And instead, when these doors were pulled open and they saw it, looked out, and there were these Nazi guards and German Shepherd, and these skeletal-like figures staring out at them from behind the fence that had dawned on a few of them, not all of them, that they were in a concentration camp and it turned out to be. So what happened here? You know, what did you discover in your research that led to this situation?

You know, Joe is, you know, not a member of any of the sort of typical classes of undesirables that the Nazis would have sent to these concentration camps. What's going on? Well, it was kind of bad timing, I guess. in the summer of 1944 after D-Day had been successful and the Germans were in retreat, you know, after the first few weeks, the Allied forces started to make some real progress and get some real traction on the ground. And the Germans were becoming increasingly desperate. And they wanted to get a little more control over the occupied French population,

which, of course, as much as it could was turning on them. So one of the edicts that came out down from Berlin was that if a down pilot was, a down pilot was helped in any way by the French resistance or even just French civilians, they were considered what we call terror fleeters or terror pilots. And it was kind of like an arbitrary designation, but it was really a way to strike fear into the hearts of the French citizens who might think about helping these pilots. And but what it also meant is that the, according to the Germans, these down pilots did not have the rights of the Geneva Convention. They did not have the same protections that that their own pilots had if they were downed behind allied lines. So these 168 pilots that were on this train with

hundreds and hundreds of others that left Paris. The idea was sent in the Buchenwald, where it was hoped very quickly they would die. And in Buchenwald is one of the more notorious of the Nazi concentration camps. It didn't take very much to die. You had guards who killed people. You had disease. You had exposure to the elements, malnourishment, starvation. So the thought was that these pilots would not last very long and they would conveniently disappear, basically. And that didn't quite happen. Tell us about Buchenwald. Let's go back in time a bit before the war. You know, it's part of this network of camps. You know, how did it start? What was its purpose? What was it intended? If I recall correctly, it started in 1937 in the mid-1930s,

and I believe it became the largest, just size-wise, of the Nazi concentration camps. And, you know, the whole concentration camp system was begun so that there was a place. There's more and more people being rounded up. Basically, before the war started in 1939, you had a place to put them. All the undesirables, you know, the gypsies, the Jews, the Catholics, the communists, just about everybody to the Germans, were undesirable. Then as the war began with the invasion of Poland in September 1930, it was also a place to put captured Polish soldiers, eventually Russian soldiers. It was just a place to send people that, I mean,

technically it was called a labor camp. So that differentiated it from something like Auschwitz, Auschwitz was a death camp. I mean, its main purpose was to kill people. But Buchenwald was a labor camp that, of course, you know, tens of thousands of people died in Bukenwald, but that was not the purpose of the camp. They worked many people to death. But the idea was that they, there wasn't. the purpose to these prisoners, they did serve some purpose for the Nazis. Buchenwald also had the distinction of being one of the very last of the camps to be liberated in April 1945. And one of the most horrifying, I point out in lightning down that at the time of the liberation, a few days after with Edward Aramuro, who was probably the most distinguished

journalist, certainly in America at that time, he toured the camp. And he was, he was seeing things that he couldn't say in his radio broadcast because it would be first of all, many Americans back home did not even know that the concentration camp system existed until they were liberated. And second of all, it was just not fit for public consumption. You talk a bit about some of the leadership of the camp to include this sort of monstrous couple, Carl Otto, Coke, I assume it's pronounced Coke, maybe it's different. And his wife Ilsa. Tell us a bit about about them. Well, I spent a little time describing, them, not only because they are, you know, fascinatingly evil people, but they were definitely

a symptom of the concentration camp system where you almost like thrived on brutality and horrible acts. Coke was a, he and himself was a very cruel man. He was a commandant of Buchadwell for several years. His wife took that really to hold other level. I mean, she was called the bitch of Buchanwald. She delighted in, you know, prisoners, anybody. was caught looking at her. She'd get on a horseback, scantily clad, let's put it that way. And if prisoners looked at her, they were executed, she even, I mean, she had a lampshade that was made of human skin.

I woke into too many details. They read the book, but this couple was, I think, representative of the absolute extremes of horror and deprivations that could happen at a concentration camp. Now, Carl Otto Koch became even too corrupt for the Nazi system. He was eventually arrested. His wife was eventually arrested also, and they spent the rest of the war behind bars for the most part. So the story is fascinating. There's a story about a sergeant in the book.

There's other stories. The casualness of the brutality and the way that life was so cheap, you know, it's a line from Casablanca, and Casabaca life is cheap. In a concentration camp, life is cheap. it's really a miracle that some of the some of them survived and it's a miracle that some of the pilots survived. So what's daily life like for Moser and his fellow pilots when they when they get to Buchenwald? It's a little bit there are thousands of prisoners at Buchenwald worked in the factories that were right next door to the concentration camp. And when the pilots got to Bukenwald after a couple of days there, there's no place to put them.

Everything was was no barracks to house them. They literally slept on the, cold stone, the plaza, and they did this for weeks upon weeks, even as cold as exposed to the elements. The nights are getting colder into the autumn. But the Nazis came to, the SS came to the pilots who were by this point, their senior officer was a man named Colonel Philip Lamison, who was a New Zealand pilot, and he had basically taken charge. And they came to him and said, you know, tomorrow your pilots will start working, and he refused. He said, we're officers and where Geneva Convention says we can't work in a factory that's building bombs and ammunition and guns to be used against our fellows.

And this was one of several times where he was within seconds of being shot or otherwise kill by the Toronto Park by Shepherd's. So they did not have to work in the factories. They did have to do some menial housekeeping jobs. But basically, the only life for them was just they, the only nourishment they had was some thin soup where the protein basically came from the maggots in the suit. There was very hard bread, almost inedible. That was partly made of sawdust.

There was pilfering going on, a few possessions that they had were stolen. And like I say, exposed to the elements. So it wasn't very long. And Joe Moser was one of these whose weight was dropping rapidly, who was subjected to dysentery theory. At one point, Joe was down to, I think it was, 105 pounds. Now, admittedly, he was. wasn't a strapping six-foot tall man to begin with, but still, if you're 105 pounds, you're not

going to survive. So this Lamison, the Colonel Phil Lamison from New Zealand, right, it takes some spine to do what he did. Tell us about him and about the sort of the culture of this group of pilots who find themselves, you know, basically in hell. Well, he was a remarkable man, and he's a remarkable character in the book. I compare him in the book that, you know, many readers and certainly some of your listeners have seen the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai is the Alec Guinness, Colonel Nicholson character. Colonel Limerson is very much life like him, but without the madness. He tells his, I mean, in addition to leading by example,

which includes defying the Nazis, having guns put to his head, have being threatened with German Shepherds, because there's a standard he wants for his, from the Nazis. But he also tells them that the way that we're going to have any chance of survival is that we have to work together. We have to make it seem like we're still a military unit. We're going to march together. We're going to eat together.

We're going to support each other. We're going to help each other. If we're going to help each other. If it's raining, if it's weather's to cold and night, we're going to try and share blankets. When they had to go to morning roll call, they marched as a unit. And they knew this was a way to keep their spirits up and also would help their spirits. They knew this was aggravating the Nazi guards who thrived on people being degraded. and humiliated and hear these men every day we're making it seem like, you know, we're still

a military unit and you're not going to break. So it's easy to imagine, you know, being a prisoner in this camp and losing hope, not hard at all. But as, as it goes, Moser and the pilots are not there for the duration of the war. And there's an intervention from this Lutvatha officer, Hans, at the risk of mispranasi, his name Hans Troutloft. So what happens? I mean, how does, how does Joe eventually get out of Buchenwald and what's the nature of this intervention? Well, you know, it was kind of inconvenient that they weren't dying. And not all the pilots survived Buchenwald, but it was kind of inconvenient that they were surviving against the odds. And so finally the order came down from Berlin to the commandant at Buchenwald, execute them.

This would be soon after a whole bunch of British S.O.E. agents had been executed. So that was the Allied pilot's turn. And it came down to within a few days of the execution. and basically all that the Colonel Lambson had left was basically a Hail Mary pass. And he had a letter, a note written in German that was smuggled to a nearby Luftwaffe base. And it got into the hands of, again, since it's another miracle, it got into the hands of Hans Trotloff, who was a German ace pilot hierarchy, somebody of real stature. He was not a fan of Hitler at all, but he was somebody who fought for his country. and he was astonished

that if the information in his note was true that all these allied pilots in Buchanwald, there was a terrible breach of a certain code of honor that still existed among some pilots, you know, sort of like a leftover of the Baron von Richthoven, Red Baron Code of Honor from the World War I.

So he arranged to have a inspection done, whatever the pretext was, at Boogunwald. And he was, you know, looked around and one of the ironies is that at this point the Colonel Troutlaw would have believed that if they were actually American pilots there, he'd be able to spot them right away.

They couldn't possibly look like the other prisoners who were skeletons by this point with this haunted look on their faces. But by now, that's what the allied pilots look like. They were almost indistinguishable in a filthy little bit of clothing they had from the inmates who had been there as long or longer than they had been there.

So he said, okay, I guess they're not here. and he's turning away when one of the pilots who spoke German called out to him to say, come see us, come see us, we're over here. Now this man certainly risked his life because they had been told, don't make any noise, don't make any commotion. And of course, they were trying to steer trout off, you know, almost like drag him out of there. And he said, you can't do this to me. I'm a hero of Germany, and I outrank all of you.

And you can't stop me. And he went over and actually had a conversation with several of these pilots. And he was appalled. This is not the way you treat fellow pilots. This is beyond any kind of cruelty that you can inflict on other pilots. So when he could, he got word up to back to Berlin that this was the situation. And very soon before the pilots were to be executed, they were transferred to a POW camp. Now, I want to emphasize here that your listeners may think, okay, that's the end of the book.

It's a happy ending. They live out the rest of the war in concentration camp. camp. But one of the things that I found most remarkable about Joe Mosu's story is that Buchenwald was just one stop on his journey that included several times when he was near death. You know, it's a remarkable story with Trial Lofton. He's just sort of a complicated figure, isn't he? Unfortunately, his intervention in shock did not extend to the, you know, the non-pilot prisoners. Correct. And I don't think he even considered, I mean, he was appalled by the condition of all the prisoners.

he had nothing, he thought the SS and the guards, the people who were in the concentration camps, and the concentration camp system was despicable. In fact, several months later, in January, 1945, he was devoted and basically exiled because he was accused of being, you know, plotting against Hitler. He just saw this terrible waste of German lives. So, but he did not really, he did not have any, ability and frankly any desire really to help any other prisoners. His focus was on the pilots. He saw, okay, if word gets out that we're treating allied pilots like this, what's to stop the allies from treating our captured pilots like this? Yeah. Yeah. Well, so Moser shows up there, you know, it's sort of this interesting and horrifying final phase of the camps, right? I mean,

if you, if you sort of study Bukenwald or Doc Howard or any of these sort of camps that begin as, you know, places to stick political prisoners and sort of evolve over time, into these awful, awful places. This last year is one of total chaos and of flooding and overcrowding. And, you know, most of the death and suffering is actually sort of concentrated here towards the end of the war. Just so happens to be when, when Moser and his fellow pilots show up. And then they leave.

And as you point out, and it's not like, you know, it's puppy dogs and roses after that. Where are they marched to? What's next? Well, there is an interval where Joe Moser and the other pilots are at this prisoner of war camp. and their situation is certainly much approved over being at Buchenwald, and one of the advantages is they have access with the Red Cross. And what this does, in addition to the practical help of Red Cross packages arriving

and to supplement limited food supply, is that because of the Red Cross getting word to the Americans, Joe Moses' mother finds out that he's alive. I mean, all she had gotten a couple of days after he had gone, his plane had gone down, is that he was missing action. And as you can imagine, every day after that, every week, her assumption is that when she hears nothing else, that her son is dead. And of all things, it's on Thanksgiving that a telegram arrives to the war department

saying that he is alive and a prisoner. So remarkable, she had a lot to give thankful for that day. But yes, as you said, the concentration camp system is becoming very fragile because the Germans are losing the war. You have the Russians, you know, marching westward. You have the Allies marching eastward, and Germany's in the middle of being squeezed. And some camps are just abandoned, but some camps, and it's the case of the one that Joe Moser and the pilots are in. There, the gates are basically opened, and this is the last week in January, and they have to march to get these.

They want to get to another camp. And it's one of the worst winters that you have experienced in the 20th century, and here you have these thousands of men who are thrust out into the the snow, the cold, the wind, the ice, the sleet and everything else for days and nights as they're marching and marching and marching and it became known as as the death march because there were approximately 1,500 men died along the way. Joe come extremely close to dying also. And it's again, another kind of a miracle that he doesn't. And but even when they, they make it to the other camp, it's still months before Joe's camp is liberated. It's one of the worst, one of the last camps to be liberated. to me, I thought, was a remarkable scene where Joe, who was again down to like 105 pounds,

because food is almost non-existent at these camps, especially with just German guards have started starving by this point. They're stealing whatever food is left. Joe is sitting by the gate to the camp and all of a sudden it smashes open and an American tank comes in. And that's how the camp is liberated. And, you know, if you can possibly imagine, somebody in that position probably thinks that this is a dream. How many times has somebody like Joe dreamed of the camp being liberated of seeing American troops again? And the day it happens, there's a surreal quality to it because you wonder, pinch myself in my dreaming. Have I just died and gone to heaven?

No, that's really an American tank. These marches in the prisoner of war camps, are these administered by the SS, like the concentration camps? Or is he back in the hands of the, as it were, the regular German army? Yeah, the Luftwaffe actually was the one that supervised. I mean, the SS supervised the concentration camps, the Luftwaffe was. that ran the got the POW camps. And yes, when this march takes place through the snow and the ice for days on end,

the guards are Luftwaffe guards. And, you know, they, their main duty, I mean, they were through these horrible conditions themselves. They were better clothed and fed, of course. But still, as each man fell, the Luftwaffe Guard's job was to drag them off to the side of the road. Sometimes they were already dead or sometimes a kind Luftwaffe guard would kill the fellow rather that just let him lie there

and definitely freeze the death. But yes, the Luftwaffe guards that were on this death march also. Yeah. And so tell us about Joe after the war. Well, Joe, again, there is, I think, a remarkable aspect of his story that takes place after the war. He eventually, it's kind of an ordeal, but he eventually makes it back to Ferndale, Washington. there's a scene where, I mean, all through the war,

especially his incarceration, he has this dream that he's going to be back with his family. He's going to see his widow of mother again. He's going to see his siblings. And there's a scene where he gets off the train near where he grew up in Washington, the state of Washington, and his mother arrives to pick him up.

And again, this is like this dreamlike aspect to it, that he did actually see his mother again. And on the one hand, Joe has a somewhat typical post-war life. You know, the idea was get back into society, get on with it, find, get married, get a job, have kids, be involved in your community, you know, have a kind of normal life. But so for that reason, Joe, like thousands and thousands of other World War II veterans, especially those who sought combat, did not talk about his experiences, but there was something

like a double whammy for Joe, and that when he, soon after he did get back, and a local camera was a FW or American Legion invites him to talk about his experiences of the war. And he talks about being in Buchampal and he's not believed. I mean, he's, in fact, people are laughing at him or they're despising him because they think he's inventing this story to become, be seen as some kind of hero. At fact, an army officer at one point says to Joe Moser when Joe talks about this, there were no Americans boom ball. You're making this stuff up.

Candidly, it does sound, you know, like I just think. if somebody told me that with no evidence or corroboration, that would be my knee-jerk reaction, too. This guy's making stuff up. Yes, indeed. And so Joe, it was horrifying the thought that people would think he was lying. And he also got very worried that, especially when he met the woman who became his wife and then as his kids were born, he was very afraid of the idea that they wouldn't believe. The people who loved it the most would not believe him. So he made a decision that he would never, ever talk about it. And that went on for year after year, decade after decade. I'd like to close with the telegram that Joe's mother received, which you have an image of in the book.

Yes. And it's just, you know, especially if you have kids. I have a couple of sons, you know, it's just, you know, reading this is kind of extraordinary. The mother, Mary, receives, you know, a notification in August that her son is missing in action. And, you know, a very politely composed version of, you know, don't call us, we'll call you. We don't know anything else. And then, you know, August passes, September passes, October passes. And you could just imagine, you know, what it's like to be this woman. And then I'll just, I'll just read it. Mrs. Mary P. Moser, 1274, Northwest Road, November 23rd, report just received through the International Red Cross states that your son,

First Lieutenant Joseph F. Moser, is a prisoner of war of the German government. Letter of Information follows from Provo Marshal General Witzel acting the Adjutant General. You just imagine, you know, holding that in your hands after those long months? I think that there's a couple of things to this that's worth pointing out. I'll do it briefly is that let's remember in a case of Mary Moser, she lost her husband and she lost a daughter as a child to an accident. And then she lost her son, you know, literally missing, missing in action. And as I mentioned before, as the days go on and the weeks go on, she has to be thinking the worst.

And so I think when she got this telegram, she was not only deeply grateful, but it's like, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, that I didn't lose another, but my son, I didn't lose another family member. I'm sure she'd thank God because Joe Moses grew up in a family that was of the Catholic faith and practiced it every day. So I think it's hard to imagine what it must be like. and I know it's happened to thousands of families since World War II where they have their sons and daughters go off to war and hear that they're missing. I mean, it's one thing if you find out that you get a telegram

that says they passed away. There's a certain maybe closure to that. But missing, that could go on forever. I mean, there's still people who fought in World War II and Korea, for example, in Vietnam, their remains were never found. Their stories were never brought to a conclusion. So at least in her case, to find out her son was alive,

Prisoner of War is nothing to be happy about. But there's a chance that she'll see him again, and she eventually does. Tom Clavin, author of Lightning Down, this is a fascinating story. Thank you so much for joining us and telling it. Thank you very much. I'm glad that I was here. This is a nebulous media production.

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