Memories Of War

Chilhowie Veteran Talks About His WWII Service

CHILHOWIE, Va. – Out came the mushrooms, crawling with worms.
Ralph Stokes might have been a prisoner of war. But, he was not lifting his fork.
“I told the guards there were worms on the mushrooms,” Stokes said. “And they said, ‘That’s your protein.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to eat it.’ And they said, ‘Alright, but it will be back tomorrow.’ ”
Stokes, however, would never return to that dinner table.
That night, in the middle of World War II, he busted out of his prison camp in Switzerland.
Then, he roamed across mountains, traveling more than 100 miles with a fellow prisoner to France.
Yet, even then, on Dec. 18, 1944, this pair did not know if they would make it home alive.

‘PRETTY GIRLS’
This wasn’t the first time Stokes had run away. At 15, he had disagreements with his daddy, and he took off, leaving behind a flood of family arguments at Sugar Grove, N.C.
“I got on a bicycle and started pedaling,” the 87-year-old remembered.
Taken in by a relative, Stokes finished high school. Then, during World War II, he joined the U.S. Army. Stokes figured enlisting would beat the draft. At least, then, he could partially decide what he wanted to do.
Stokes took to the air as an airplane mechanic. Still, he remembers the words of a recruiter, telling him how flying would give him sergeant’s stripes and a 50 percent increase in pay.
“And they offered pretty girls,” Stokes said. “They said, ‘After you get these silver wings on your chest, that you can’t knock the girls off them.’ ”
Was all that true?
“No,” Stokes said flatly.

‘BE GLAD’
Completing basic training in May 1943, Stokes joined the 453rd Bomb Crew of the 8th Air Force.
Like others, this crew had an assignment to complete 25 missions. “Then,” Stokes said, “they said you could go back home and go to the states and never be asked to fly again.”
Was Stokes scared in the air?
“All the time,” he said, smiling. “But you just grinned. And be glad when it was over.”
This crew dropped a series of 2,000-pound concussion bombs over targets in France and Germany, falling on cities called Brunswick, Frankfort, Hanover and Mannheim.
Then came a moment of fate.
With 14 missions complete and 11 to go, Stokes and his B-24 crew were shot down, captured on April 25, 1944, and taken to a prison camp in Switzerland.
Stokes, over the next few months, would actually find himself in three different prison camps.
“And I ate practically nothing,” he said. “I lost 40 pounds in eight months.”

‘SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN’
Next came the worms.
It was Dec. 18, 1944. And, by this time, Stokes and a fellow prisoner, John Sullivan of New York, had planned on escaping in January.
But the worms?
That changed it all.
Stokes simply had to get out of there.
He faked a toothache on the day of his escape, and that enabled him to buy a train ticket to Bern.
“There were certain restrictions, but we were not housed behind barb-wire,” Stokes writes in “Fourteen Down and Eleven To Go” (2008), a self-published booklet detailing his imprisonment.
“We were not confined to our building and were allowed to browse around the community,” Stokes writes.
Stokes, of course, never went to the dentist.
He ended up in France – more than 100 miles away, he said. “We went down the side of a mountain and came up on a chalet in France at 2:30 a.m.”
The escaped prisoners told the man at the chalet door that they were members of an American bomber crew. “But he didn’t know any English,” Stokes said, “and we didn’t know any French.”
Leaving the house and later hiding in some bushes, the pair looked out and saw some American troops.
That morning, they were saved.

‘AWFUL LUCKY’
Going back to the United States, Stokes spent the rest of his service time at American bases. He was discharged in October 1945, about a month after the war ended.
In more recent years, the gregarious Stokes has become a fixture in local schools, sharing his war stories across Smyth, Wythe and Washington counties.
Only now, at 87, this longtime resident of Chilhowie has trouble getting around. For years, he’s been afflicted with a muscle impairment.
Nurses take care of him. And so does an old pal, John Morgan, a retired school principal from Smyth County.
Stokes, a retired insurance advisor, lost his longtime wife – the former Gladys McCallister – to an early death in 1994.
Today, he said, “I barely can feed myself. And I don’t drink from a glass; I drink from a straw.”
Even so, he counts his blessings.
“I am proud that I was privileged to serve, and I consider my honorable discharge one of my most prized possessions,” Stokes said, smiling. “I’ve been awful lucky.”
One of his greatest strokes of luck came in 1995.
That’s when he heard, again, from Hilda Graf, a 29-year-old shopkeeper that he had met in Switzerland.
In 1944, on the eve of his escape, Stokes had given Graf some letters, pictures and a diary, along with some money to mail all that to his home in North Carolina. But, over time, Graf never made the delivery.
Then, along came another shot-down airman – Norman Fuller of Fort Collins, Colo., as Fuller toured Switzerland, years later, trying to find familiar ground.
Fuller met Graf. “And she said, ‘I’ve got some material for an airman, but I lost his address,’ ” Stokes recalled.
A prisoner of war at the same camp, Fuller took Stokes’ materials from Graf and began a search, ultimately finding one of Stokes’ brothers, who, in turn, found Stokes.
Catching up with Fuller, Stokes posed a burning question. “Did you eat the worms?”
“Not on the first day,” Fuller returned. “And I didn’t eat them the second.”
“What about the third day?” Stokes probed.
Fuller paused, then replied, “It was the best damn eating I ever done.”