by Doug Hoelscher
Homer R. Kuck
From the time I was a youngster at home on the farm I knew Homer Kuck as the appliance repairman. If Mom had any trouble with the kitchen range or the refrigerator, she called Homer. I really got to know him, however, after I was married and moved to town. We bought our house in 1972, and from that time till Homer’s passing in 1989, we were neighbors and friends. Either of us could look out from our front porch and see the other’s house. I remember one amusing incident that happened at a house that was situated between us. The next time I saw Homer uptown having coffee, I started to tell him about it, and he immediately started laughing. He had watched it too.
Homer liked new electronic gadgets, and he had the first cordless phone I ever saw. One evening he came over, and my wife Linda sent him to the basement where I was tinkering with something. He showed me that phone, and we could pull his home dial tone from my basement. I called my phone from it, and Linda couldn’t understand how I could be calling from Homer’s phone in our basement. I called him over once when our refrigerator wasn’t working properly. Instead of having the coils mounted on the back, they were underneath and completely full of dust. His brush only reached a small portion of it, and he asked me if I had anything to get the dust out. I told him I could bring the compressed air hose up from the basement. He laughed and said that he didn’t think Linda would appreciate that dust blown all over the house, and I told him it would be better than a refrigerator that didn’t work. So we used the air hose.
Homer told me quite a few stories about his bombing missions over Germany and his POW experiences.
His crew was given a brand new B-17 Flying Fortress upon completion of their training. They named it the “Tailwind” and chose the nose art that was painted on both sides of the plane. When they arrived in Europe with it, that plane was taken away from them, and they were given an older one with battle scars. He explained that on one of their early missions neither he or the pilot Willard Hadjes had their hand on the four throttle control levers in between their seats. A shell ripped up through the plane between them, and it should have exploded inside the cabin. Instead it continued all the way through and made an 18 inch exit hole in the top. The B-17 was known to be a plane that could continue to fly with heavy damage, and they made it back safely from that mission.
When their crew was shot down they made an emergency landing, and no one was injured. Homer told me that when they came down they crossed a roadway with ditches on both sides, and it was a pretty rough ride. After they came to a stop, one of the crew members remarked that it was the best landing they ever made. They all came out of the plane uninjured. Homer told me that he buried his service pistol under a tree because if they were captured it was better to be unarmed. The crew members paired off and departed on foot.
NOTE: This is the crew that Homer Kuck flew his missions with. The plane is the new B-17 named “Tailwind” which they flew to Europe. Number 5 in the front row is the man that Homer teamed up with for their escape attempt. This information is all available on the internet by doing a search on “Hadjes Crew”.
He said everyone was captured the first day except him and his partner Floyd Jones. They went in a different direction and traveled on foot nine or ten days. When they were captured they were within one day of crossing a border into a friendly country, which I think was Holland. They stole civilian clothes from clotheslines so they could ditch their Army uniforms. They stole food when they could and even tried digging up seed potatoes. They milked cows in the field. They traveled at night and hid during the day.
After they were captured they were prisoners of war until the end of the war when the American troops raided the prison camp. He said he was never deliberately mistreated, however the conditions were often less than desirable. He said when they had to be moved to another camp, they followed a wide road, and the German soldiers were stationed some distance away on both sides of the road. They weren’t crowded or pushed, but they just had to keep moving. He said that the TV show “Hogan’s Heroes” reminded him of some of the things they did in the prison camps.
I remember my dad telling me once that Homer went back to Germany to try to find the pistol that he buried. I asked Homer about that, and he told me that things had changed too much to find the place where they went down. When he inquired about the B-17 that crashed in that area, the locals asked him, “Which one?”
I have always been fascinated with the airplanes in the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson airfield, especially those used in World War II. Many times I wished that I could spend a day with Homer at the museum. In 1988 I heard or read that a newly restored B-17 would be flown from Dover Delaware to the museum for exhibit following a 10-year restoration.
On the morning of October 13, 1988, I made my usual trip to the Main Street Station for coffee. I mentioned to Homer that I was planning to go to the museum, and he invited me to go with him. We met his son Stanley there, and we spent the whole day together. It was the most enjoyable day I ever experienced at the museum. He told me about each of the planes he had flown in training and pointed out himself in some pictures on the walls. One was a picture of a class graduating from flight school in Texas, and Homer was the person closest to the camera. It was the best museum tour I’ve ever had. He spent the whole day on his battery powered mobility cart, and when we got back to his vehicle in the parking lot, the battery on the cart died. I was very fortunate to have had this experience with him because he passed away on January 27, 1989, only three months later. To me Homer Kuck was a great friend and a hero, and until my father passed away, I missed Homer more than anyone else I ever knew.