Their mission was over. The plane, racing away after bombing oil refineries in Blech hammer, Germany, had just one final obstacle to clear—a lone flak gun in Hungary.
It was not to be.
When a piece of shrapnel severed a critical fuel line, Wally Volkman remembered hoping the plane could make it to the Yugoslavian border. The captain finally gave the order to bail and Wally jolted out the door of the bomber at 20,000 feet.
When his parachute failed to open Wally began to panic. “Time goes slower than you’d think,” he told me. “I remember pondering how I would soon be in heaven, that I would never get to marry my sweetheart, June.” At about 1000 feet–at the very last possible moment–the chute finally opened, gently landing Wally between two trees.
The dramatic dive may have sacred him half to death, but it likely also prevented his death. The Copilot who jumped out just after Wally was fatally shot out of the sky as his parachute—an easy target—floated downward.
Pondering his options, Wally hid himself in a mound of roadside brush until a friendly partisan discovered him that night, offering to secretly transport him in a wooden wagon piled high with hay. He was reunited with his surviving crew members—after enduring a pitchfork search of the hay wagon by German soldiers.
For six weeks, Wally and his crew worked their way through Yugoslavia, traveling 300 miles on foot—mostly at night. Finally, they met up with Allied forces at the Adriatic Sea.
Wally reflects, “I’m thankful to my mother who prayed for me all the time. The ironic thing was, at the same thing, my brother—a paratrooper—went missing at the Battle of the Bulge. He, too, survived and went on to become a minister.”
In the years since I interviewed Wally, he has passed away. But I'm convinced there's a lot more to his story. And because this World War 2 vet loved Jesus even more than he loved his country, I'm looking forward to getting all the details when time shall be no more.
Until then, here is my salute to First Lieutenant Wally Volkman—an America Hero.