Staff Sgt. H. Keith Mosley DFC
United States Army Air Force
from:Jenkintown, PA
He enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1943.
Trained as an aerial gunner, Mr. Mosley flew 29 missions without incident on a B-24 Liberator out of England. On Nov. 26, 1944, during his 30th mission, just before he was to have rotated back to the United States, his entire squadron was shot down as it bombed the last German oil refineries at Misburg near Hannover.
He was locked in the top ball turret of the burning plane until pilot Wayne E. Stewart released him.
The aircraft exploded just as Mr. Mosley parachuted out. Five of the 10 men in the plane, including Stewart, were killed.
He was taken prisoner by the Germans. He spent 30 days in a room 8 by 10 feet in solitary confinement. He told of keeping his sanity by reciting poetry he had learned as a child and by calling imaginary baseball games featuring the Detroit Tigers.
At the end of December 1944, he and other prisoners were crammed into a cattle railroad car and taken to Stalag Luft Camp IV in Poland.
On Feb. 26, 1945, the prisoners began the "Death March Across Germany." Until the end of April, guards kept the starving prisoners on the move in snow and bitter cold, to delay their liberation by the advancing Soviet army, and later by the American and British armies.
The prisoners walked 800 miles across Poland and Germany, sleeping in barns and fields. They were given a quarter of a loaf of bread a week, so they subsisted by scrounging for food in garbage dumps.
He sold his sweater to a German housewife for a bowl of soup and exchanging his Army boots for a can of beef stew with a Sikh member of the British army.
In the final days of the march, he was so weak he fell behind his unit. But thoughts of home and his fiancee empowered him to catch up. On April 26, 1945, near Halle, Germany, an American jeep drove up while the men were resting by the side of a road and liberated them.
The men were taken to a temporary camp on the French coast before being shipped home. "How emotional was the moment, as we sailed into New York Harbor and glided past the Statue of Liberty," Mr. Mosley told his family.
The men were taken to a temporary camp on the French coast before being shipped home. "How emotional was the moment, as we sailed into New York Harbor and glided past the Statue of Liberty,"
He was honorably discharged from the Army Air Force in October 1945 with the rank of staff sergeant.
He was awarded the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Ribbon with four bronze stars, the Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters, and the Distinguished Flying Cross. He died, aged 91, on 26th November 2015
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