On Christmas Eve 1944, in Southampton, England, George Bigelow and the U.S. Army’s Sixty-Sixth Division boarded the Leopoldville, a converted Belgian cruise liner bound for France. They were rushing to reinforce depleted American forces fighting the Battle of the Bulge. But the unit, nicknamed the Black Panthers, never reached that battlefield. A German U-boat sank their ship, plunging Bigelow and 2,000 other soldiers and sailors under the icy waters of the English Channel in the middle of the night.

Bigelow was working as a welder at the Navy shipyard in Wilmington, Delaware in early 1943 when he was drafted. “I thought I’d be put into the Navy because of my experience, but the recruiter pointed to me and said, ‘Army.'”

By the time his unit was sent to England in late 1944, Bigelow was a sergeant. When they boarded the Leopoldville, “we were squeezed in like sardines,” he recalls. Sailing alongside the Leopoldville was another troopship, the Cheshire, and several escorts, but at 5:15 in the morning, a German torpedo hit the Leopoldville five miles off Cherbourg.

“When I went down with the ship, I had my Mae West [life preserver vest] on. I didn’t think I’d survive, but I saw something like a nine-inch television screen above my head, and every happy scene from my life flashed onto that screen,” he says. “I thought of my son, who was going to be born in March, and I prayed for him and my wife. That caused me to be calm and peaceful.”

He grabbed onto a piece of wood, and passed out several times during what he estimates was two hours in the frigid water, before he glimpsed a rope and was pulled into a tugboat. Four of his twelve men drowned, along with fourteen officers and 744 other enlisted men.

While the survivors were regrouping and waiting for supplies, another division was hurried to the Battle of the Bulge in their place. “I have always felt grateful–and guilty–about that,” he says. “Many of us probably wouldn’t have survived the Bulge.” Instead, his division was sent to Brittany-Loire. “Our job was to contain the 45,000 Nazi troops guarding submarine bases between St. Nazaire and Lorient,” Bigelow says. “Every night I would take another man, cross the river, and spy on German troop movements. We made limited-objective attacks and kept up a constant harassment. One night I lost two of my men when we captured two Germans.”

The Black Panthers lived in dugouts and used their helmets as washbowls, stewpots, and frying pans. “We lived on K rations, but whenever I could buy a couple of eggs from the French, I’d fry them in my helmet,” Bigelow says. “Once in a long while, we’d have a hot meal served behind the lines. I remember falling asleep while standing in line, I was so tired.”

The Americans repulsed a heavy attack in mid-April 1945, then gradually advanced on the Germans, who surrendered May 8. Bigelow lost his last man that day. “A guy named Black told his buddy that he was going to get a Luger to bring home. We never saw him again.”

On May 20, the Sixty-Sixth moved into Germany, serving on occupation duty in Koblenz briefly before leaving for Marseille, expecting deployment to the Pacific. But the atomic bombs changed the course of those soldiers’ lives. Instead of sailing for Japan, the Sixty-Sixth remained in France until late October, then sailed for home.

George Bigelow met his son when the baby was nine months old. He used the G.I. Bill to attend Northwestern University, and his Army buddy Don Boble helped him land a teaching job in Ann Arbor. He taught at Tappan, Huron, and Pioneer.

“When I think of the war, I think of the horrors,” Bigelow says. Then he adds, laughing, “I complained from the day I got in to the day I got out, but I’m glad I did my part.”

When Bill Godwin was seven years old, a neighbor in St. Catharines, Ontario, invited him to climb into his plane and fly with him. The neighbor was Arthur “Roy” Brown, the Canadian ace responsible for shooting down Germany’s most famous World War I ace, the Red Baron. Godwin, now ninety-four, says that first flight instilled a love of flying that would have major consequences for him.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, Godwin was married and enrolled at Wayne State, preparing for a career in law. He tried to enlist in the U.S. Air Corps, but they took only native-born men. “Congress had to pass a law allowing Canadians to join the CPTP [Civilian Pilot Training Program] and fly for America. There were thirty of us who went in when I did,” he says.

College students who agreed to join the Army Air Corps after graduation took a seventy-two-hour ground school course followed by fifty hours of flight instruction at facilities near 1,132 college campuses; U-M was one. Godwin graduated first in his class and immediately began training other fliers for the Army Air Corps–among them the famous Tuskegee Airmen.

The army eventually shipped Godwin, by then a training commander, to Australia. “Pilots in Europe were released from combat after fifty missions, but pilots in the Pacific were told, ‘You fly until we win,'” Godwin says. He trained countless pilots and flew twenty-two missions as a command pilot.

“We didn’t fly missions until September of 1944, because we didn’t have enough planes or pilots,” he explains. “We were always short of men and planes. If the Japanese got one of my kids, I went out after them,” to take revenge and rescue survivors.

Life on the ground was far from glamorous. His crew lived by their wits, sleeping in shacks or tents or bombed-out buildings and eating Spam–“Spam in the morning, Spam at noon, and Spam in the night,” he says. “For a change, we’d have Spam soaked in eggs. I hated Spam.”

Godwin flew Ypsilanti-built four-engine B-24 “Liberators” during the campaign in Papua, New Guinea. “We practiced low-level skip bombing,” he says. “The Japanese would zoom down to get us and not realize how close we were to the ocean–clouds look like islands. Many Japanese would hit the water.” His group moved on to the Philippines and Okinawa, flying over China, Formosa, and Japan to attack shipping, airfields, and airways.

As command pilot, he flew with a formation of B-17s (Flying Fortresses). “Flying in a B-24 was like opening a barn door in a high wind,” he says. “I was in the [formation’s] ‘coffin corner,’ where the planes tended to stall out at lower speeds because of winds bouncing off the planes in front.” Godwin’s aircraft shot down thirteen Japanese fighters and destroyed 110 tons of enemy shipping. Three times, his planes were shot up so badly they were disabled, but each time he managed to land safely, once on a beach under Japanese fire. On his last mission, he flew over Hiroshima the day after the atomic bomb was dropped. “After the war I learned that the Army anticipated that we would lose one million men per island as we moved closer to Japan. Whenever people say we shouldn’t have dropped the bomb, I say, ‘Go to hell.’ That bomb saved six million or more American lives.”

His war experiences convinced him of the Buddhist wisdom that “Every man has a little God in him,” he says. “No one likes to kill another. I read a letter written by a kamikaze pilot to his mother, and it broke my heart. By the time we were based in Okinawa, some of my pilots would sit and stare and not eat, they were so depressed by the carnage.”

Godwin earned the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts, and was recommended for the Distinguished Flying Cross before returning home, where he changed career plans from law to dentistry; he is a professor emeritus of the U-M dental school.

Nowadays, he meets with fellow veterans weekly, and together they salute fallen friends. “After the war, I didn’t keep in touch with my crew,” he says. “I had to put the war behind me. I never talked about my experiences until I was ninety-one. I can’t be glad that I fought, but I am glad that I served my country.”

“I have a guardian angel. I have no doubt about that,” says Bob Carpenter. “I met him on June 16, 1944.”

At five o’clock that morning, just as the sun was rising, Carpenter climbed into his B-25 for his fortieth mission over central Europe. He joined an air battle over Vienna and survived unscathed, but while flying back to his base, he was surprised over Hungary by two Messerschmitts, which shot him out of the air. He spent the next ten months as a prisoner of war.

Carpenter had enlisted at eighteen and was called into service at nineteen, soon after he married. He trained at four different bases before boarding a ship for Casablanca in January 1944. By the time the ship landed, the Allies had driven the Germans out of North Africa and moved on to Italy. Carpenter flew his first mission over northern Italy in a P-38 “Lightning,” a twin-bodied fighter the Germans called “the fork-tailed devil.”

“We used it for dive bombing, strafing, ground attacks, night fighting, and photo reconnaissance,” Carpenter says. “It was big for a fighter, with a fifty-two-foot wingspan. At the beginning of the war, it was the fastest plane in the air. Later, I flew the twin-engine B-25s. I had four or five close calls while escorting damaged bombers and fighters. Three of my planes were disabled by enemy bullets but landed safely. Once I was close enough to see the enemy. He was in a [Messerschmitt] 109. I was thirty or forty feet from his tail, and he turned around to look at me. I remember how young he looked.”

On D-Day, Carpenter flew over southern France. Later, in the Balkans, he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for destroying four locomotives and four planes on the ground. Out of his group of twenty-one fighter pilots, Carpenter became the fifteenth shot down.

When the two Messerschmitts ambushed him, they fired into the canopy. “The bullets missed my head by inches,” he recalls. Carpenter bailed out over Lake Balaton. “I was on fire,” he says. “My parachute opened when I was 300 or 400 feet above the ground, and the wind sucked the boots off my legs. I hit the ground going pretty fast. Fortunately, I didn’t break anything.”

Four farmers holding shotguns ran across the field to capture the fallen airman. They turned Carpenter over to Nazi SS officers, who took him to a hospital in Budapest, where doctors treated severe burns on his neck and arms. “About fifty Americans were in one long room, some with burns, others shot up or with broken limbs,” Carpenter says. When the hospital released him, Carpenter was sent to solitary confinement in a penitentiary, where he was fed a small bowl of soup–“with nothing in it”–once a day.

After being interrogated at gunpoint, Carpenter stayed in a house in Budapest owned by a woman who had once lived in Cleveland. Then–still shoeless–he was sent by train to Stalag Luft III, a Luftwaffe-run prison camp for Allied air force officers. “By the time I got there, 300 Americans were being shot down every day, and the place was very crowded–we had close to 8,000 men living eight to a room in twenty-by-twenty-foot barracks,” Carpenter says, adding, “But I was lucky to be a Luftwaffe prisoner. Germans are very hierarchical. They respected officers. Life in other POW camps was much harsher.”

Because the American compound was so crowded, Carpenter was assigned to the RAF compound. “We had the best recreational facilities of any POW camp in Germany,” he says. “We had basketball, softball, boxing, touch football, volleyball, table tennis, fencing, books, a theater, band, orchestra, and POW newspapers.” They also had lice, dysentery, hunger, and a serious lack of hygiene. “At one time I didn’t take off my underwear for five months,” he recalls. “When we finally got showers and stripped, everyone looked like zombies–skinny, with their ribs sticking out.

“My camp experience wasn’t far different from Hogan’s Heroes,” he adds. To prevent German spies from infiltrating the prisoners, newcomers to the camp had to be vouched for by two POWs who knew the prisoner by sight. The guards were too old for combat, and prisoners followed them constantly, using signals to warn of their whereabouts; often they traded their Red Cross candy bars for contraband, including cameras. “We had men tunneling. We had a hidden radio to hear the BBC news. We had guns hidden. And we had plenty of cigarettes, cigarettes from all over the world; we all smoked three packs a day. What we didn’t have was food.”

When Carpenter first arrived, prisoners received Red Cross parcels weekly. They contained a can of margarine, a can of corned beef, a can of Spam, a package of dried milk, vitamins, and candy bars. But then each parcel had to be shared by two prisoners, and within weeks the Germans began stealing them.” Though his wife and family also sent packages, not one of them reached him.

By January 1945, Stalag Luft III held 2,500 British officers, 7,500 Americans, and 900 Allied officers from other countries. Just before midnight on a snowy January 27, with Russian troops only sixteen miles away, the POWs were marched out of camp in below-freezing weather. That was the first of three forced marches from one prison camp to another. On the last one, he and another prisoner rolled into a ditch and hid there until the column passed. Then they headed off on their own, keeping ten kilometers away from the forced march. “We roamed the German countryside for ten days, trading cigarettes and soap for eggs and potatoes,” he says. “German civilians were finding American flags to wave. They were tired of the war. Their sons and husbands were all killed, and they wanted it to end.”

When Carpenter and his friend heard increasing artillery fire, they finally checked themselves into Stalag XIII at Nuremberg, the day before it was liberated. By then the German guards were disappearing. “We found 130,000 POWS crammed into a camp built for 14,000,” he remembers. “We saw General Patton ride into camp on his jeep, like a god, along with the whole Third Army.”

GIs gave the starving prisoners candy bars and other food while they waited five days for buses to transport them to an airfield. When Carpenter arrived at Camp Lucky Strike in France, loudspeakers were playing America’s number one hit song, “Don’t Fence Me In.” “Talk about irony,” he says. When doctors weighed him, he tipped the scale at 130 pounds–fifty pounds less than when he’d enlisted.

Carpenter earned a degree in business administration from the University of Detroit, became the father of four children, and built a successful plumbing and heating supply company in Ann Arbor. But even now, the war continues to haunt him. “For a long time, whenever I heard loud noises, I dove for cover. And I’ve had nightmares about getting shot down a couple hundred of times. Oddly, I have been having more of them lately.”