James J. McDermott was born in Clearfield, Pennsylvania in October 1920. He worked for a brick manufacturing plant and was at work when somebody told him about Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941]. He knew we were going to war but figured it would have been through England and France. His local Elks Club [Annotator's Note: Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks] took 18 to 20 of them to take the tests for entry into the service. About a month later, on 10 March 1942, he was sworn into the US Army Air Corps cadet program. He went to Houston, Texas to Ellington Field for basic training. He then went to primary training school but was reclassified and sent to navigation school in Hondo, Texas in February 1943. He graduated July 1943. After training, McDermott was assigned to the 24th Antisubmarine Squadron [Annotator's Note: cannot verify squadron]. It was a B-25 [Annotator's Note: North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber] squadron at Westover Field, Massachusetts. They did search patrols for the Navy for about three months before being disbanded. They were then transferred to B-17s [Annotator's Note: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber]. He was sent to Tampa, Florida to a Replacement Training Unit at Drew Field. He picked up a new crew there. They trained and went overseas together.

James McDermott considered the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress the best airplane there was. He did not like the B-24 [Annotator's Note: Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber]. They would come back all shot up but still come back. The 305th [Annotator's Note: 305th Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force] had airplanes that came back with extra special damage. They seemed to attract a lot of Messerschmitt fighters. McDermott was a second lieutenant and navigator. The crew make-up at that time was pilot, copilot, navigator, bombardier and six gunners. The bombardier flew the bomb sight and also ran the nose turret. They had ten guns on board. The waist gunners had single .50 caliber guns [Annotator's Note: Browning .50 caliber machine gun]. The others had twin .50s. McDermott's position was behind the bombardier on the left. There was a tunnel up to the flight deck and the pilot was right above him. They left Hunter Field, Georgia in March and headed to Goose Bay, Labrador where they stayed for three or four days due to bad weather in England. They flew up to Iceland and waited again then they flew into Valley Wales, [Annotator's Note: Wales, United Kingdom] left that airplane, and then went to the bomb group. Normally they would have gone to Bovington [Annotator's Note: Bovington, England] for more training, but the 305th had lost some planes at Saarbrucken [Annotator's Note: Saarbrucken, Germany]. He joined them at Chelveston [Annotator's Note: Royal Air Force Chelveston, Northamptonshire, England] as part of the 366th [Annotator's Note: 366th Bombardment Squadron, 305th Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force]. The facilities were Quonset huts. There was the map room where you find out where you were going that day. You would then go and check out your parachute and heated suit and get on the plane. You saw other planes go down, but never thought it would be you. When he got there, you had to fly 25 missions to go home. Then they raised it to 30. He was shot down on his 28th [Annotator's Note: on 3 August 1944].

James McDermott was not in England as early as the 305th Bombardment Group was. They had sent 16 planes on the Schweinfurt mission [Annotator's Note: known as "2nd Schweinfurt" raid on Schweinfurt, Germany on 14 October 1943] and only three came back. McDermott got there in 1944 and things were getting better. Flak [Annotator's Note: antiaircraft artillery fire] was still heavy, but the fighters were starting to drop off. The P-51s [Annotator's Note: North American P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft] with the Rolls Royce engines and twin wing tanks could take them all the way in [Annotator's Note: to targets deep within Germany]. When the aircraft got close enough to the targets, the flak took over and both the German and American fighters left. McDermott would look out there and not know how those guys were getting through the flak, and the next thing he'd know, he was going through it. The mission McDermott was shot down on was a raid on a German oil plant in France. They were to go in through Holland and head toward Munich [Annotator's Note: Munich, Germany]. On the way down, he looked out the window and thought they were close to Kaiserslautern [Annotator's Note: Kaiserslautern, Germany] where someone had been shot down the day before. Right then they took a burst. The plane to their left went down and they lost an engine. The ball turret gunner got hit. The group turned South. They could not keep up with them and they started to double-back under the groups coming in for protection. They ended up alone and German fighters attacked. They knocked out another engine and the pilot hit the bailout alarm. McDermott decided to leave. He swung back and forth for a long time before he landed in a ditch on his back. He got up and there was a German there with a pitchfork. The German told him the war was over for him. That was the end of his flying days.

James McDermott had bailed out of his stricken Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and could see it still going North. In 2007, he and his grandson went to Europe and found the site where the plane went down [Annotator's Note: in Baden Baden, Germany]. They met a man named Rudy Yeager. He had been a ten year old boy and saw the fighters chasing the airplane. He saw the parachutes and then saw the plane crash. Later, Yeager worked as a woodsman in that area and he found pieces of the plane. He gave them to McDermott. The German took him into town where a youth with a gun took him and marched him into an office and strip searched him. McDermott was cold and wet and waited four or five hours before a German sergeant came and got him. In the next village, they picked up the tail gunner. They spent the night and then went into Haguenau, France to a German fighter base brig [Annotator's Note: jail] for three or four days. A truck with more men came by and they were all taken to Frankfurt [Annotator's Note: Frankfurt, Germany] for interrogation. In the attack, the ball turret gunner [Annotator's Note: Warren Dunphy] was badly injured. The waist gunner [Annotator's Note: Joe Quain] threw him out. The tail gunner [Annotator's Note: Chas Newell] had a cracked ankle. When Dunphy, the ball turret gunner landed, the fire chief of the town found him lying on the ground. He was taken to a German hospital that had been a monastery. The fire chief got in trouble with the Gestapo [Annotator's Note: Geheime Staatspolizei or Secret State Police] for doing that. The chief's son had gone back at night and gotten Dunphy's boots and parachute and hid them in his attic. If they had found that, who knows what would have happened to them.

James McDermott says that the Germans did not treat them badly. If you were taken by the Luftwaffe [Annotator's Note: German Air Force] and they registered you as a prisoner, they took care of you. The Germans were great on records. They had big cards with their pictures on them. They knew everything about them. When the fighters had been chasing the airplane and were flying alongside of it, McDermott had seen a guy with a notepad writing stuff. He was getting numbers off the airplane. By the time he got back, he could find out the "triangle G" [Annotator's Note: aircraft tail marking] meant the 305th Bombardment Group. If he could pick up the numbers, he could figure out what squadron it was. They were not mistreated. When he was interrogated, he was put in a room by himself for hours. They would ask questions and he would follow the Geneva rules [Annotator's Note: standards for humanitarian treatment in war]. They told him what they knew about him, but he still did not tell them anything, after a couple of days they stopped. They knew the target because the group had gone and hit it. They practically obliterated it. He was shot down on his 28th mission on 3 August 1944. After interrogation in Frankfurt [Annotator's Note: Frankfurt, Germany], he was sent to Wetzlar [Annotator's Note: Dulag Luft; Prisoner of War transit and interrogation camp]. He then was sent by train to Stalag Luft III [Annotator's Note: in Zagań, Poland] on the Polish border. He was there from the middle of August [Annotator's Note: August 1944] until around 12 January [Annotator's Note: 12 January 1945]. They then marched 50 miles to Spremberg [Annotator's Note: Spremberg, Germany] and got on box cars. His group went to Nuremberg [Annotator's Note: Stalag XIII-D Nürnberg Langwasser, Nuremberg, Germany]. They stayed there until April [Annotator's Note: 1945] and then were marched to Moosburg [Annotator's Note: Stalag VII-A, Moosburg, Germany]. They were there a few weeks when Patton's [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr.] Third Army came through and liberated them. One of the tanks came through and someone asked them what Army they were with. The tanker replied that he did not know because they had been moved around so much. Another asked, "are we liberating prisoners today?" When the soldier replied "yes", the other then said, "you can bet your butt, we are in Patton's Army then."

Stalag Luft III [Annotator's Note: in Zagań, Poland] was not bad for James McDermott. It was a break between boredom and expectation. They were other doing nothing or they were wondering what was going to happen. Would the Battle of the Bulge [Annotator's Note: Battle of the Bulge or German Ardennes Counter Offensive, 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945] break down? Are they really going to get back into France? How bad is it going to be? It was either one or the other. In the wintertime it was cold and windy. He would put on as much clothing as he could find to go to bed at night. He would get up in the mornings and just walk circuits in the yard to keep warm. He would stop to see if any news was posted on the board and just try to keep busy. They did get news. In the North compound, the British got the BBC [Annotator's Note: British Broadcasting Company] almost every day. The British would put the news in a coffee can and throw it into the South compound to the Americans. One day, an American yelled that Paris [Annotator's Note: Paris, France] had fallen. Even the Germans did not know that. The British then stopped throwing the news over because the Americans could not keep their mouths shut. McDermott only wrote to his mother a couple of times. His mother said that her letters had been censored. He does not remember ever receiving any mail. There were three different Red Cross packages: American, Canadian, and English. They were supposed to get one per man per week. There were eight men per room. They could do well if they got eight per week. One of the British was a pretty fair cook. The men would keep their chocolate and cigarettes. The rest went to the cook. Once in a while they got a little meat from the Germans. If things got bad, they would go on half rations. That was pretty tough. The British had a FOODACO [Annotator's Note: food and tobacco store], where they could barter for food. The chocolate bar was the gold value. It was worth different numbers of cigarette packs based on the brand. McDermott discovered that he could get more out of trading cigarettes than smoking them.

James McDermott was being held in the British, North, compound at Stalag Luft III in Zagań, Poland. That is where The Great Escape [Annotator's Note: mass escape of 76 prisoners from Stalag Luft III in Zagań, Poland on 24 and 25 March 1944] took place. When the North compound was full, they built the South for the Americans, and then the West compound. The Germans cut the trees down, but the prisoners built them. They also pulled up the stumps to burn for heat. McDermott arrived after the great escape in 1944. The Germans had shot 50 British prisoners, so they had extra space. It was not a good feeling. He was in building 206 and the prisoners who took part in the escape had tunneled out of 204. Security was very tight. They had what they called ferrets that would come around with poles and check the sandy soil under the barracks. If they hit something solid, they would report it. The British had great gardens and used that to hide the sand from digging tunnels. The Americans did not know of the tunnels but were told that if they came across stripes of sand, to kick it around to hide it. The British made tubes out of socks that they hid under their clothes. They would let the sand out of the tubes by pretending to tie their shoes. The head tunnel man was Wally Floody [Annotator's Note: Royal Canadian Air Force Flight Lieutenant Clarke Wallace Chant Floody] from Canada.

James McDermott would get barley soup once in a while from the Germans [Annotator's Note: while a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft III in Zagań, Poland]. They took what they could get. If they could keep the Red Cross parcels, they could get by. The Germans would often claim they did not come in, but the Swiss Red Cross was there and kept a watch on it as best they could. When McDermott was in Nuremburg [Annotator's Note: at Stalag XIII-D Nürnberg Langwasser, Nuremberg, Germany], they ran out of food. The Americans painted some six by six trucks white with red crosses on them, got the Swiss to drive them, and brought in food from Switzerland. They did pretty good with that. McDermott marched from Spremberg [Annotator's Note: Spremberg, Germany] in the wintertime to Nuremburg. It had been a Hitler Youth [Annotator's Note: youth organization of the Nazi Party] camp. There were a lot of bugs. He slept on benches because the fleas had chewed him up. It was rough. A group of men had been strafed by Americans while being marched from prison to prison, but the word got out and they were not bothered after that. The trip down from Nuremburg to Munich was not that bad because they could sleep in barns and it was getting warmer. They could barter with the German housewives with coffee for hot water. The Germans were getting fearful of the Russians coming and were not antagonistic towards the Americans. They were more worried about getting away from the Russians.

James McDermott was in Moosburg [Annotator's Note: Stalag VII-A in Moosburg, Germany] when it was liberated on 29 April 1945. Somebody said to look up on the hill. He looked up to see what looked like tanks coming down. He noticed the German guards were gone. A tank came through the gate and somebody asked the guy what Army he was in. He replied he was in Patton's [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr.] Army today, because they were liberating prisoners. He has a picture of when the tank first came in and a picture of it just afterwards. You cannot even see the tank. There are guys hanging all over it and on top of it. It was a great day. About two days later, Patton came through. McDermott saw him and to him, Patton looked like a man who really wanted what he wanted. He did not have a good reputation, but he got the job done. It was great to longer be a prisoner. When the first kitchen outfit came through and gave them white bread, it was like eating angel food cake. They had only had black or barley bread until then. One of the biggest things to have in Stalag Luft III [Annotator's Note: in Zagań, Poland] was a deck of cards. If a loaf of bread came that had to sliced, they cut the cards and the guy with the lowest card had to slice it and got the last piece. The highest card got the first choice of slices and so forth. If you had a good cook, you did not change anything for him. There were five British and three Americans in McDermott's room. One of the British was a good cook. After the camp was liberated, they stayed in Moosburg for about three days. They walked to Landshut and were picked up by C-47s [Annotator's Note: Douglas C-47 Skytrain cargo aircraft] and flown to France. They then went on six-by-sixers [Annotator's Note: two and a half ton truck, also known as deuce and a half] to Camp Lucky Strike [Annotator's Note: Cigarette Camp, temporary staging] at Le Havre [Annotator's Note: Le Havre, France]. They were there until a boat came to take them home. One of the scariest trips he made was to Le Havre because they were being driven by the Red Ball Express [Annotator's Note: Allied forces truck convoy system]. Some of those guys were awful drivers. He was more afraid being in that truck than he was of being shot at. He returned on a Merchant Marine ship.

James McDermott was at Moosburg [Annotator’s Note: Stalag VII-A in Moosburg, Germany] when the Germans surrendered. He walked over to a little village the day after they were liberated, 30 April 1945. There were some GIs [Annotator’s Note: slang term for an American soldier] sitting around a building who told them they had been moved back for the first time ever. He found a few days later that talks were going on. He returned to the United States in May 1945. He went into Boston [Annotator's Note: Boston, Massachusetts] and then Fort Dix [Annotator's Note: Fort Dix, New Jersey] and got new uniforms and pay. He bought a lot of cigarettes. He went into New York and was waiting for a train to Pennsylvania. He asked a guy to watch his bags while he called his folks. He came back and gave a cigar to the guy. When he got home, he realized the guy had stolen a carton of cigarettes. It was great to pull into Boston Harbor. Any place that had a decent place to sleep and get a good hot shower was great. He left the service in December 1945. He was home on leave in August [Annotator's Note: when the Japanese surrendered on 15 August 1945] and went to Miami [Annotator's Note: Miami, Florida] where he was reassigned to Sacramento, California. He was trying to get closer to home and was at Wright-Patterson Field, Dayton [Annotator's Note: Dayton, Ohio] for four or five months and was then discharged as a first lieutenant. He stayed in the active Reserve and retired after 20 years of service time as a Lieutenant Colonel.

James McDermott does not think the Japanese surrender affected him as much as the war in Europe ending did because he feels that he was so different from the men who had been prisoners of the Japanese that he knew he was lucky to have been where he was and not mistreated [Annotator's Note: as a prisoner of war of the Germans]. It was a great relief that the guys would get to come home, but he was detached from it. He did not take advantage of the G.I. Bill. He got a job and did not take advantage of the 52-20 Club [Annotator's Note: provision of the G.I. Bill that enabled all former servicemen to receive 20 dollars of unemployment benefits per week for 52 weeks while looking for work]. World War 2 changed his life in that he would probably have still been making bricks. When he came back, he wanted something different and went to work for the post office. He got married and had children. They managed to get by really well. His has three grandchildren. His service time and his prisoner of war time had him figure out a dollar was worth a dollar and a meal was worth a meal. He had done without both for so long. He had told his grandson that he had sauerkraut boiled, fried, stewed, and baked. He has not had any since he got out of the prison camp and he hopes he never gets hungry enough to eat it again. He feels that The National WWII Museum [Annotator's Note: New Orleans, Louisiana] is important, and he appreciates the museum getting him and the men there on their reunion to get their viewpoints. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer asks his grandson, who is off-camera, if there is anything he missed. The grandson prompts him for a story about a guy from Chicago, Illinois.] In Stalag III [Annotator's Note: Stalag Luft III in Zagań, Poland], there was a guy named Gilbert who hurt his back when he landed [Annotator's Note: after bailing out of an aircraft]. The Germans worked on him and he was in fair shape. Due to his bad back, he got the bottom bunk. When he would get out of it in the morning it would take him a moment to get stood up. There were five British and three Americans in their room. Gilbert would click his heels together, make a salute and say, "Heil Hitler, in case we lose." The British would go crazy and say, "Get them up mad Mike". He did that every day. Later they were in Nuremberg [Annotator's Note: Stalag XIII-D Nürnberg Langwasser, Nuremberg, Germany] and there were three guys from McDermott's hometown [Annotator’s Note: Clearfield, Pennsylvania] in Luft III. Two other guys came in. Gilbert came through and when McDermott introduced him to the men from his hometown, Gilbert told him he thinks the whole damn town gave up.