Cullerton, William John

Capture

On 5 April 1945, Cullerton was shot down while bombing the airfield at Ansbach, crashing on a hillside near German troops. When the Germans found him, they captured him, disarmed him, and then shot him to his surprise. Cullerton recalled it this way, "They briefly conferred about what to do with me, then a man came up to me, held my pistol in his hand and said, 'The 'war' is over for you' - and shot me in the stomach."


Cullerton was then found wounded by a local farmer who thought he was a German pilot. He took Cullerton to a German hospital, where the soldiers tortured him. A Jewish doctor then helped him escape from the hospital, telling him to jump out a window into a pile of sheep dung. Cullerton did so and managed to escape.

Rescue

He was found wounded by American soldiers hiding under a bridge near Feuchtwangen (which is about 30 kilometers from where he was shot down). The soldiers were not sure whether he was an American or a German posing as an American pilot. They tested his nationality by asking him a simple question: "Who is Ted Williams?" Cullerton correctly answered that Williams was "An excellent splinter" who plays for the Boston Red Sox, thereby confirming himself and subsequently breaking down 1). A Chicago-area newspaper headlined the discovery as "Return of Capt. Cullerton's return is far from a miracle."


1) This system was introduced by the Americans after the Battle of the Bulge, when Otto Skorzeny established a unit of English-speaking Germans in American uniforms to infiltrate the American rear. Here they misdirected retreating American troops, flipped signs, cut telephone lines, sabotaged charges to blow up bridges, and other tasks designed to disrupt troop coordination and demoralize the enemy. German soldiers who thus disguised themselves in enemy uniforms knowingly waived their wartime right to capture; a soldier so captured was labeled a spy and shot on the spot or severely interrogated. As a precaution, the Americans instituted a system of questions whereby anyone who looked suspicious was called upon to answer a question, most often a sports question such as who played for which baseball team, who won the championship, etc. The downside to this system was that not every American was familiar with these questions and it could easily happen (and did happen) that Americans shot their own by mistake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Cullerton