(Cover Photo, Wingspan Magazine, Summer 2006;

Official Publication of Montana Wing Civil Air Patrol)

(Facing Page)
 Major Jim Brown: His Story
As told to State Director Joe Macklin

#2 in the Montana Wing Heritage Series

At the recent 2006 Montana Wing Conference, we had a

special guest at the head table. Major “Jim” James
Benjamin Brown, a member of Skyhawks Senior Squadron,
Great Falls, Montana, for 34 years, is a WWII veteran. His
story, as rendered by State Director Joe Macklin, lent
special poignancy to the moving ritual of the POW/MIA
table. The entire room was rapt as attendees heard of Major
Jim Brown’s WWII Prisoner of War experience. Here, as
told to Joe Macklin, is Major Brown’s story:

James Benjamin Brown was born Feb. 5, 1920, in Maze,

Kansas. Jim has one brother and one sister; his father was a
wheat farmer who went broke in the 1920s and moved the
family to Lincoln Heights, a suburb of Los Angeles,
California. His dad became a cement worker and building
construction worker. Jim lost his mother when he was but a
young boy.

After graduating from Lincoln High School in 1940, Jim

enlisted in the U.S. Army Corps on July 10, 1941. He told
the recruiter he wanted to be a pilot or a mechanic, but after attending boot camp in Ft. McArthur,
California, he was assigned to Moffett Field, where he worked in supply for the next couple years.

After applying to be an aviation student, he took his primary flight training at Ryan Field, California.
There, he flew the PT-22, Ryan ST open cockpit trainer. He continued training at Lamore, California,
flying the PT-13 tandem trainer. Finally, he attended advanced training in Arizona, spending four months
flying the AT-9 (an all-metal heavy trainer) , AT-17, and AT-18 (Cessna fabric aircraft). Jim earned his
pilot wings and was commissioned as a flight officer in April 1943.

His first operational duty station was Biggs Army Air Field outside of El Paso, Texas, where he flew the
Consolidated B-24 Liberator as a copilot and aircraft commander. Transferred to Langley AAF, Virginia,
he flew the B-24 with the 455th Bomb Group. While at Langley, Jim took a crew to Willow Run factory in
New York to pick up a brand new B-24. He flew the plan from New York, over the Statue of Liberty, and
delivered the bomber to Langley. As he passed over the Statue of Liberty, he said, he dove down and flew
under the great lady’s right arm. “What were they going to do to me?” he asked. “I was already going into
combat.”

Deployed to Casino Ascea, Italy, in February 1944, he landed in South America and Africa to refuel the B-
24 enroute to Italy. In Europe, he made bombing runs over Germany, Czechoslovakia, and several other
Axis countries.

The day he was shot down, they were bombing the Moosbierbaum oil refinery on the outskirts of Vienna,
Austria. It was June 26, 1944. Jim said he remembers looking down earlier in the flight, seeing the GIs
fighting on Anzeo Beach, Italy, and thinking, “I’m glad I’m up here at 20,000 feet.” 1st Lt Brown was shot
down on his 41st combat mission.

“I lost all four turbos while cruising at 20,000 feet,” he recollected. “They were smoking, and I had to head
back to the base. I got down to 3,000 feet and everything was back under control. I overflew a runway on
the way back and was chased by 16 Focke-Wolf 190 fighter aircraft. I made a sharp right-hand turn directly
into the oncoming formation (a defensive tactic designed to misalign the fighters’ weapons), and the
Number 2 engine took the full blast and caught on fire. I dropped my (landing) gear as a sign of surrender,
and ordered four officers and six enlisted crew members to bail out.”

Jim’s B-24 aircrew consisted of an aircraft commander, copilot, navigator, flight engineer, radio operator,
two wastegunners, ball turret gunner, and tail gunner. “They called the ball turret gunner the “suicide
gunner” because he was in a bubble underneath the belly of the aircraft,” he explained.

Jim Brown was the last one out. He pulled his ripcord and
ultimately landed in a cherry tree. His back injured in the
shootdown; he was awarded the Purple Heart for his actions in
combat. After discarding his parachute, he was walking down a
trail in a field of grape vines and trees. An Austrian man and his
son came up to Jim and said, “Come, come.” Jim replied, “No
way.” Then some men started yelling at him. Armed with rifles
and sporting white arm bands, they were German soldiers. He
then surrendered to them, yielding his Colt 45 pistol.

The party headed to the village. Walking into the village,

children would come up to him and hold his and talk to him. Jim
was housed in a cellar that normally housed goats. Several of the
children looked into his cell and spoke with him. Then, German
soldiers came in trucks, picking up Jim’s entire crew; that was
the first time he was reunited with his crew.

They took Jim to the Wiener Neustadt train station just south of
Vienna. He was surrounded by a bunch of civilians who Jim
thinks saved his life that day, as the two German guards were
likely going to shoot him if it weren’t for the crowd around him.
Then, he was transported via train to Stalag Luft III, near Sagan,
Germany, the backdrop for the book and movie The Great Escape.

Stalag Luft III was located 100 miles southeast of Berlin in what is now Poland. The POW camp was one
of six operated by the Luftwaffe for downed British and American airmen. Compared to other prisoner-of-
war camps throughout the Axis world, it was a model of civilized imprisonment. The Geneva Convention
of 1929 on the treatment of prisoners of war was complied with as much as possible, but it was still war,
still prison, and still grim. With a madman on top, there was the ever-present threat that authority above the
Luftwaffe could change things on a whim. Kriegies always
new that they were living on the razor’s edge.

Stalag Luft III was all officers. Jim Brown was imprisoned
there for seven months from June 1944 until January 1945.
On January 27, 1945, at his 4:30 staff meeting in Berlin,
Adolf Hitler had issued the order to evacuate Stalag Luft III.
He was fearful that the 11,000 Allied airmen in the camp
would be liberated by the Russians. Hitler wanted to keep
them as hostages. A spearhead of Soviet Marshal Ivan
Konev’s Southern Army had already pierced to within 20
kilometers of the camp.

In the barracks, there was a frenzy of preparation—of

improvised packsacks being loaded with essentials,
distribution of stashed food, and of putting on layers of
clothing against the Silesian winter. As the men lined up
outside their blocks, snow covered the ground six inches
deep and was still falling. Guards with sentinel dogs herded
them through the main gate. Outside the wire, Kriegies
waited and were counted, and waited some more, as for two hours icy winds penetrated their multilayered
clothes and froze stiff the shoes on their feet. Finally, about midnight, the South Camp moved out.

The nearly 11,000 prisoners of Stalag Luft III forced to march for interminable miles in minus-20 degree
weather. Hour after hour, they plodded through the blackness of night, a blizzard swirling around them and
winds driving well below zero. Those who survived were put on railroad cars and transferred to other
stalags. Jim was interred in Stalag Luft VI near Munich.

In general, the camps were segmented by barbed wire into Compounds, each of which contained several
“Lagars,” or barracks. These were divided into rooms which held upwards of 40 men in triple-tier wooden
bunks. From the prison camp, the internees could see the Nazi flag flying above. They also saw the flag
coming down and the Stars and Stripes going up. “It was a moment when 10,000 men cried,” Brown said.

On April 29, 1945, the Third Army arrived and Jim and his colleagues were repatriated.

Jim returned to the United States on board the SS General Gordon troop carrier enroute to New York.
Then, he boarded a train and traveled to his home in Los Angeles. The Army gave him 60 days leave after
the war; during that time, he had pneumonia and was hospitalized in Pasadena, California.

When he was well enough, he was sent to Ft. George Wright in

Spokane, Washington. While there, Jim met his wife-to-be,
Alice Provost from Sidney, Montana (near the North Dakota
border). He continued to serve in the U.S. Army and Air Force,
retiring as a Major in 1962. One of his mission involved flying
around the world in a C-124 Globemaster to support the KC-97
which was plotting the magnetic equator. After retiring from the
Air Force, he worked at the Malmstrom Air Force Base (Great
Falls) Commissary for 27 years.

He and Alice were married on June 29, 1946, and will celebrate
their 60th anniversary this summer. They had six children, four
of whom survive, seven grandchildren, and one great-
grandchild. Alice remembers traveling alone with their six
children, all under age nine at the time, to join her husband in
Japan, where he was stationed. After marrying, she was, as she
puts it, a “domestic engineer.” The couple still resides in Great
Falls.

Jim Brown in 2006