Donald Dukeman.
The man.
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.
Missions flown.
Before and after.
Born 10 November 1923 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Enlisted in the Army Air Corps in November 1942 and trained as a flight engineer and top-turret gunner at Kessler Field, Willow Run, and Harlingen. Married his high school sweetheart, Helen Pauline Piersol, on 19 February 1944, ten days before shipping overseas with the Digman crew.
After the war, Dukeman worked a series of jobs in Pennsylvania before becoming a rural mail carrier in 1964, retiring from the Postal Service twenty years later in 1984. He and Pauline raised four children after losing their first daughter in infancy in 1946. He was active for decades in the Lions Club, the VFW, and Boy Scouting in Honey Brook, Pennsylvania. In 2002, at his family's request, he wrote his memoir, 'Destined to Survive,' dedicated in part to pilot Richard C. Scott Sr. and to the memory of Bill Kirlin, and reconnected with the rest of the crew starting in 1992 through Eugene Shabatura and Jos van Roozendaal. He attended a memorial gathering at the Castelré monument on the crash's 50th anniversary in 1994.