Donald Dukeman

T/Sgt. Donald W. Dukeman served as flight engineer aboard B-24J 42-100416 'Baggy Maggy' on the 18 September 1944 supply mission near Arnhem. Reported missing in action after the aircraft was shot down; status remained MIA on the original MACR.

Dukeman was not part of Hewin's regular crew -- he belonged to the 409th Squadron's Digman crew and was flying his ninth combat mission overall, filling in for Hewin's regular engineer, T/Sgt. Frank L. Wathen, who had broken his arm in a bicycle accident the day before. He had flown a low-level practice flight with Hewin's crew that same morning before being told he would fly the mission itself.

On the flight deck, Dukeman helped move the badly wounded Hewin off the controls and assisted radio operator Bill Kirlin in tending him. With the intercom shot out, Dukeman crossed the open bomb bay -- no parachute, on a six-inch catwalk, under direct fire -- to warn the waist and tail gunners to take crash positions. He was one of the least seriously injured in the landing and used a pocketknife to free bombardier George Sadler and co-pilot Richard Scott, who could not release their jammed safety belts.

Captured immediately, Dukeman was marched with navigator Henry Greenberg to a German holding point, then transported toward the Dulag Luft interrogation center near Frankfurt, with an overnight stop at the then-empty Nuremberg concentration camp along the way. At Dulag Luft he endured two days in solitary confinement and a beating with a rubber hose for refusing to answer questions beyond name, rank, and serial number. He arrived at Stalag Luft IV in Pomerania (POW #3692) on 7 October 1944. On 6 February 1945, with the Russian advance approaching, he was forced onto what became an 86-day, roughly 1,000-mile winter evacuation march across Germany -- retrospectively called the 'Black Death March' -- surviving on stolen potatoes, foraged vegetables, and shared Red Cross parcels; his weight fell from 175 to about 90 pounds. He was liberated near Lübeck on 2 May 1945.