Observing Memorial Day while growing up in Harrison, Joe Cowan recalls, meant family time and maybe a typical American cookout.
“We always appreciated the day and what it stood for,” said Cowan, now 66 and living in Little Rock. “But we didn’t do anything different.”
That’s changed now for him, Cowan said last week as Memorial Day weekend approached. That’s because of the accounts his late dad, Kirby Cowan, finally revealed in his later years about his time spent with 167 other Allied airmen at the German Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II, and the near execution of every one of them.
Kirby Cowan, who died in December 2009 at age 87 in his hometown of Harrison, was among a special group of veterans referred to as the “Lost Airmen of Buchenwald.”
The airmen’s story, largely unknown for decades after the war - primarily because survivors said they were ordered by military authorities not to talk about their experiences - was told in a 2011 documentary film, Lost Airmen of Buchenwald, by Mike Dorsey. The documentary’s story, told through the eyes of seven survivors, chronicled the plight of the airmen from the United States, Canada, Britain and other Allied countries who were shot down and captured behind enemy lines, treated as spies and barely escaped being put to death at Buchenwald. More information on the film can be found at lost airmen.com.
Cowan, who has a copy of the documentary, showed it earlier this month to a group of residents at the Woodland Heights retirement apartments in Little Rock, where his mother, Cloteen Cowan, 88, now lives.
Joe Cowan also just recently learned more information about the events atBuchenwald from an April blog article on jonathanturley. org that featured his father’s experiences. The article was written by guest blogger Charlton Stanley, who had known Kirby Cowan and e-mailed the younger Cowan a copy of the post.
“Memorial Day means a whole lot more nowadays,” Cowan said. “Really we just ignored it, except for cooking on the grill or something. … Dad was a very humble, soft-spoken, laid-back man. He never put himself out there regarding any of this.”
Kirby Cowan’s plane was shot down in June 1944 over Paris during a bombing raid,Joe Cowan said. After parachuting out of the plane, Kirby Cowan was aided by the French Resistance, his son said, as were the other airmen who would eventually end up at Buchenwald. But then small groups of the captured airmen were betrayed by a double-agent who instead turned them over to German Gestapo agents in exchange for payment.
All of the Allied airmen were imprisoned and branded as terrorists instead of prisoners of war and denied any rights as POWs. Then on Aug. 20, 1944, according to Stanley’s article, Cowan and many others were transferred to Buchenwald in crowded boxcars. All 168 arrived in the summer of 1944, according to the documentary.
Buchenwald, built in 1937 in east-central Germany, was one of the largest concentration camps, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. Other online histories tell of medical experiments done at the camp, starvation, beatings, murders and mock executions.
The blog account and the film tell of the inhumane treatment the airmen received at Buchenwald, but also of how they banded together to use their military discipline to their advantage against their captors in order to better survive as a group. Two didn’t live through the ordeal.
Ironically, it was members of the Luftwaffe, German airmen, who went to the Allies’ aid, fearing retaliation against their comrades if word spread to Allied forces of the mistreatment. Because of the Luftwaffe’s involvement, 156 of the remaining Allied airmen were transferred out of Buchenwald on Oct. 19, 1944. The rest who were too ill to be moved were transferred soon after. All were supposed to be executed only days later, survivors have been quoted as saying.
“From that point on [from being shot down], he lost contact with the outside world until he came back to America in 1945,” Cowan said of his dad. “Then they [military authorities] told them not to talk about it, apparently.”
However, after his father’s retirement from Flexsteel Industries in Harrison, Cowan said his parents began traveling to reunions with other surviving airmen from Buchenwald.
“Dad never talked about this at any length until later in his life,” Cowan said. “It was just getting stuff out of him little by little. I’m their only child. I didn’t know to ask many questions because he didn’t bring these things up.
“Until they started going to the reunions and recognizing people there, and then the tears would start to flow and there would be a retelling of the things in their memory,” he added. “They’d go to Canada, Florida or wherever they would hold a reunion.
“A lot of people didn’t think Buchenwald ever existed,” he continued. “So Dad didn’t talk about it too much until some of these guys started to come forward and also some of them started to die off. What the blog does is document that Dad’s experience was the same as that of the others in the documentary.”
When his dad’s parachute landed on a field in France, Cowan said, it was on property that is still owned by the same family. It had a foundry back then, and one of its owners helped his dad to safety, he said.
When Kirby Cowan died in 2009, someone unexpected showed up at his funeral, his son said. It was a nephew of the man who had helped get his father to safety 65 years before.
Seeing his fellow surviving airmen at the various reunions “was real closure for Dad,” Cowan said, after so many years of keeping secret about what he had experienced. Telling his dad’s story now does much the same for him and his mother, he said.
“Dad’s story is not unique,” Cowan said. “It’s like that of many, many others. He’s just my dad. Telling his story is telling the story for a lot of people.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 05/27/2013