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From a young age Patrick Carr dreamed of being a pilot in the Army Air Corps, even sending for literature from Jackson when he was twelve. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered WWII, nineteen year old Carr enlisted in the Army Air Corps determined to make that dream a reality.

Unfortunately, Carr washed out of the pilot program because of faulty depth perception. It was then he decided to enter gunnery school instead and became a waist gunner on a B-24 Liberator heavy bomber. This week we dive into his story from this interview recorded on October 4, 1973.

1973 \\u2013 Patrick Carr grew up on a farm near the small community of Paulding, Mississippi. In this episode, he recalls joining the Army Air Corp and becoming a gunner on a B-24 bomber in 1942. In August of 1944, Carr\\u2019s plane was shot down during a bombing run over Budapest. He remembers the angry mob waiting for him and being captured by the Germans.

Carr was held prisoner in a German POW camp (Stalag Luft IV) during the final eight months of WWII. He describes the meager rations they lived on and being slapped around by the guards. As the Russian Army advanced on their camp in the closing days of the war, Carr and his fellow POWs were marched away from the front line by the German guards. He describes a couple of times they were at risk of being killed by friendly fire.

PHOTO: Model of Stalag Luft III, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=534329