Chester G. Clem, B-17 Pilot

My great-grandmother Elenor (always pronounced “El-lean-er” in an East Texas drawl) was married five times, the fifth time to her first husband. Every story about her starts that way.

Elenor’s father, William Higgins “Wiley” Sanders, had opinions about her husbands. When she briefly married the ice man, Wiley considered it so far beneath her that he moved out of the house and into a tent in the backyard in protest.

Her fourth husband was a man she met through a newspaper’s Lonely Hearts personal ads, and she moved to Oklahoma to be with him. He turned out to be a drinker and an abuser, and one day Elenor called her three boys, Chester, Earl and Willis, to come get her. They drove up from East Texas to get her out. 

When they arrived, their 3rd-stepfather met my grandfather Earl at the door with a loaded .357 Magnum and a firm proclamation: “I don’t like you.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Chester. “Why don’t we sit down, have a drink, and talk about it?”

Chester took the man out back to the picnic table and drank him under the table on brown liquor. By the end he had negotiated a divorce for his mother and made an all-cash offer on the man’s handguns that he couldn’t refuse. I own that .357 today.

While Chester was drinking and dealing, Earl and Willis quietly packed Elenor’s belongings into the car. They left the stepfather asleep on the picnic table, and Chester passed out in the back seat for the drive home to Texas.

Making peace is like making sausage, sometimes you're better off not asking how it was made. That story has always guided how I think about negotiations, and to a lesser degree my attitude toward moving days. 

Growing up, I didn’t know much about the man I was named for. He died of a heart attack while hunting in the woods in 1971, eleven years before I was born. Before that he had been a WWII pilot, a prisoner of war, a fisherman, a drinker and a cigar smoker. Ever since I first saw The Great Escape as a kid, I assumed he was Steve McQueen’s Captain Hilts.

I have photos of him at international fishing tournaments in Venezuela in the 1970s, looking like the everyman’s southern gentleman that Canadian Club ads try to evoke: a glasses case clipped in one chest pocket, a row of cellophane-wrapped cigars in the other, drinks in hand with his fishing buddies.

After the war, Chester and his best friend Bill Parker ran an air conditioner manufacturing company in East Texas, which by all accounts was good cover for their hunting and fishing. Bill Parker gave me Chester’s hunting knife on my 12th birthday. Parker is my middle name, and my son Gus’s.

When my dad left the East Texas oil fields to go to college in New England, it didn’t sit well with my grandfather Earl, who built oil tanks and figured his taxes had already paid for a seat at the University of Texas. Chester gave Earl endless hell for letting his son go to school with a bunch of long-haired communists. But when my dad came back every year for opening weekend at the deer lease, with an era-appropriate haircut and Maine lobsters in tow, it was Chester who made sure he was welcomed back into the group.

I came to understand that the man I first knew only as a war hero was most comfortable as a peacemaker. When things got tense, he knew to sit down, have a drink, and talk about it.

Chester, his brothers, and Elenor came from very little in Henry’s Chapel, Texas, a town of about 75 people. Their father Ralph, Elenor's 1st and 5th husband

Chester enlisted in the Army Air Forces with his best friend Bill Parker as soon as their age allowed. His younger brother Earl, my grandfather, later lied about his age to join the Navy Seabees and shipped out to the South Pacific at 17, weighing 120 pounds. [picture TK here of Earl the seabee]

Chester became a second lieutenant and B-17 co-pilot in the 560th Bomb Squadron, 388th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force, flying out of Knettishall, England. His tour was early in the war and short: September and October 1943, and a handful of missions before he was shot down. Long-range fighter escorts hadn’t arrived yet, so the bombers flew deep into Europe alone, slow and heavily armed, and took terrible losses.

I was able to trace two of the three planes he flew. The first was “Pistol Packin’ Mamma.” Several planes carried that name, after a popular song of the time, but the tail number matched this one. It was later wrecked by another crew.

His last mission was B-17F 42-30802, “Gdynia.”

The target was the port of Gdynia, Poland, then the 388th’s longest mission. It was part of a major 8th Air Force strike on submarine yards, aircraft plants and German fleet units at Danzig and Gdynia, the raid documented in the 1944 War Department film Target for Today.

Twenty-four aircraft of the group took off by 08:19 and headed out over the North Sea and across Denmark. By the time they reached Gdynia, the Germans had laid a smoke screen over the port, hiding the assigned target, the cruiser Nürnberg. The group circled out over the Bay of Danzig for a second run, and the lead bombardier spotted a large ship berthed at the French Wharf through a hole in the clouds. Bombs away came at 13:11. The liner Stuttgart was left burning.

Flak was unusually accurate at the Danish and German coasts. On the way home, about 35 German fighters attacked off Denmark. Two of the group’s planes were lost: Lt. Nagorka’s “Iza Angel,” which blew up after the crew bailed out, and Lt. Kinney’s “Gdynia,” with Chester in the right seat.

At 14:54, “Gdynia” was shot down by a Ju 88 night fighter, D5+OX of 12./NJG 3, flown by Leutnant Hermann Stock out of Grove. With the No. 3 engine on fire, the whole crew bailed out. The plane came down on Bollet Sand at the north end of Rømø, where its remains still surface at low tide (Airwar over Denmark, Søren Flensted).

Radio operator Eugene Tobias landed first, next to the German barracks on Mandø, and broke his leg. The rest came down in a line across the tidal flats of Kore Sand and walked toward Mandø, where German soldiers were waiting. They were held in a dune under a machine gun, trucked to the airfield at Esbjerg, and within a day or two sent to prison camps in Germany.

Through the internet, translation tools and a lot of serendipity, I was put in touch with Theodor Hansen, who was ten years old and in school on Mandø that afternoon:

“We saw small white dots growing bigger and bigger and after a while we were able to see that it was parachutes each with a man underneath. We all ran up upon the dunes… We saw the whole crew minus Tobias march close by us at the foot of the dunes. I thought that they were very good looking. They were our friends and liberators. They passed us as prisoners of war but they were not broken.”

Chester spent about 18 months as a POW. His mother was notified by telegram that he was missing, and days later the Red Cross reported him in captivity. She kept a scrapbook of the news clippings, the few letters he was able to send home, and a receipt for two boxes of cigars from New York that he asked to have sent to his camp. He wasn’t going to let a world war stand between him and a nickel cigar.

He ended up at Stalag VII-A at Moosburg, one of the largest POW camps in Germany. It was liberated by Patton’s Third Army on April 29, 1945, the day before Hitler’s suicide. When Chester came home, he refused to talk about the camp, other than to say the food was bad.

Chester and Margaret F. McClain had a daughter, Janet.

The Clems came from Ittlingen, in the Kraichgau region of Germany. Johann Conrad Klemm arrived in Pennsylvania in 1747 and is buried at Augustus Lutheran Church in Trappe. His son Johann Davidt Klemm received 260 acres in Powell’s Fort Valley, Virginia, from Lord Fairfax in 1766, and the family helped found St. David’s Lutheran Church there.

Later generations moved west: Michael Clem served in the 54th Illinois Infantry in the Civil War, and his son Eugene moved the family to Troup, Texas, where he farmed until 1938. Eugene’s son Ralph worked in the oil fields and left Elenor and their three boys when they were young.

The family had been in America for nearly 200 years when Chester was shot down over Denmark. There were always questions in the family about what the Germans did to their diaspora who didn’t return to fight for the motherland.

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