The Never Ending Story

In the fall of 2014, I received an email from Chris Geringer, the grandson of Warren Stuckey, the right waist gunner on board “The Miss Zeke.” He said, “My grandfather evaded capture, and I have all his wartime items that were saved . . . Last year I made contact with a guy in Croatia that found the crash site.” Among his grandfather’s papers was the serial number of “The Miss Zeke” (42-52276). You can see “The Miss Zeke” here complete with the “art” on the side and its original crew – not my father’s crew.

Chris went on to say, “My grandfather got the Distinguished Flying Cross metal for getting the tail gunner (Palmer Lerum), left waist gunner (Herman Lipkin), and ball turret gunner (Chester Eide) out of the plane before he jumped. The tail gunner was unconscious and missing part of one leg and the left waist gunner was wounded badly in the jaw and leg. The ball turret was jammed, and the gunner could not get out. My grandfather was working on getting the ball turret gunner out when a ME-109 (German plane) attacked and a machine gun round hit the oxygen bottle above him exploding and wounding him in the process.” 

“The guy in Croatia” is Radovan Zivanovic who has spent the last 14 years researching crashed planes in his country. With the help of friends, he has found crash sites from about 65-70 planes, including “The Miss Zeke.” He has also connected with living crew members or their families; collected a lot of stories; and even found human remains from two B-24 crew members and one German pilot.

In 2009, he found the “Miss Zeke” crash site near the village of Gorinci near Generalski Stol. He found enough pieces to conclude it was a B-24. The plane was like every other; scrapped by locals. They used parts for different things or sold metal to a scrap yard. Eyewitnesses told Radovan that the plane crashed in the spring of 1944 (April 2) and that some of the crew were saved by partisans, some were captured, and one member (Dennis King) was found dead in the plane. He was buried in the local cemetery, and after the war exhumed.

He also found MACR (missing air crew reports) documents from the Croatian Army for April 2, 1944 that said two 4-engine bombers crashed near Generalski Stol. He ruled out the other plane and concluded that 42-52276 had the one that crashed near Gorinci west of Generalski Stol. 

This spring Radovan mailed Chris some parts of “The Miss Zeke,” and he sent a piece on to me and my sister. It was a strange feeling to be holding the piece of the plane my father had flown.

“My grandfather Warren Stuckey (right waist gunner) and Claude 'Red' McCrocklin (bombardier) were friends before the war,” said Chris. “Claude had dated my grandfather’s sister. He joined the Army Air Corps before my grandfather and was an officer. As an officer he had the ability to request specific people for the airplane crew. When my grandfather joined the Army Air Corps, his sister wrote Claude and asked him to get her little brother on the airplane with him and keep him safe. My grandfather passed away in 1995. I got to know Claude after that . . . I talked with him on his 90^th birthday.” Here are Warren and Red in later years. 

Chris told me story about my father: “When I was a kid my grandfather told me a story about when they were in training. He said one day the pilot, assuming your Dad, told him to grab his parachute and come with him. Apparently there was some discussion the night before at the Officers’ club, and a bet was made that you could not pull the wings off a Stearman in flight.  If you don’t already know, a Stearman is a biplane they used to tow the target socks for gunnery practice. The pilot told him they were going to give it a try. The plan was to climb high above the base, place the plane in as steep of dive as possible, and the pilot told my grandfather when he feel the stick coming back he was supposed to grab on and pull as hard and fast as he could. My grandfather said they did exactly that. He said they both pulled on the stick as hard as they could, and when they woke up, they were just flying in a nice circle both wings still attached.” This sounds like something my father would do.

“The Miss Zeke” crew parachuted out at different times which helps explain why some were captured and some were saved by the Yugoslav Partisans. Although Palmer Lerum was found by the Partisans, he later died of pneumonia and infection in a Yugoslav Partisan Military hospital (below is a photograph provide by Radovan of his funeral in Yugoslavia). In a letter to his mother, (which Chris shared with me from among his grandfather’s papers) the American officer, Captain George S. Wuchinich, describes the battle that downed “The Miss Zeke”:

“I was in the country where Palmer was shot down, and he parachuted a few hundred yards from where I was watching the air battle in the skies. You know, by now, that he jumped on to land controlled by the Yugoslav Partisans, and I was the officer in charge of the American Mission where he fell. The sky battle was furious, and it was not all one sided. One Messerschmidt came down out of the fight roaring over our heads and flew so low that it disappeared in to the horizon. We saw one chute from the bomber billow out and realized he was going to drop close by. There was no fear of Germans closing in to gather the flier since we were well in the middle of liberated territory. The battle took place at about 17,000 feet, and the bomber went on.

“This lone jumper gradually came closer, and we saw he was about to land only a few hundred feet from us on a hillside. Several Partisans began a race across the ground toward him, but were outstripped by a second lieutenant from the Russian Mission. The lieutenant immediately looked over Palmer and found he had been shot in the knee. The battle in the sky had been rugged, and Palmer was dazed from the shock. Before the blood could begin to flow the lieutenant had stripped of his shirt and tore it into strips for a tourniquet. Within a matter of minutes, he was brought down to us from the hill, in a stretcher, and a cart was hitched to take him to a Partisan military hospital. Partisan nurses made him comfortable in the cart, and I talked to him so that he could gain assurance from an American officer. He was in a strange country among people who spoke a strange tongue, and I knew that hearing me speak would give him confidence and also a feeling that Uncle Sam had not left him in a lurch.” Thank God for these partisans.

This map above, provided Radovan, shows where World War II plane wreckages were found. “The Miss Zeke” crash site is circled in red. Below is a current map of the area. The plane was found directly southwest of Zagreb, Croatia.