By Nathan Cote, Ph.D., Department of California, Post 731

Samuel A. Wheeler was born on May 12, 1922, and spent his childhood in Midway, Ala., a small town that would send one of its sons into the skies over war-torn Europe and into one of the most extraordinary survival stories of World War II. Sam's career with the U.S. Air Force spanned both military and civilian service, taking him from the cockpit of a B-17 bomber over Italy to personnel offices in Georgia, Japan and South Korea. He served his country with distinction and was awarded the Prisoner of War Medal for his service and sacrifice during World War II. Sam passed away in the 1990s in Sun City, Fla., where he lived out his retirement years with his beloved wife, Betty, always by his side.
Shot Down
I met Sam Wheeler in Korea, where he was my boss at Osan Air Base. He was a civilian personnel officer by then, a quiet, friendly man who approached his work with the same characteristic he brought to all aspects in his life. We worked together for two years, and in all that time Sam never once talked about the war. Not once. He wasn't the type to share war stories over coffee or reminisce about his service. The past was the past, and Sam kept it there, locked away in some private place where memories of combat and survival lived undisturbed.
I learned about what happened to him the way you learn most important things about purposely quiet men - by accident, and in pieces.
We'd become friends, I suppose, in that way that happens between a boss and an employee when the age difference is significant, but the respect runs both ways. He was in his early 60s then, sharp as a tack, a real Southern gentleman raised in the deep south.
On Dec. 29, 1944, Sam was 22 and the co-pilot on a B-17 Flying Fortress, aircraft number 44-6652, part of the 301st Bomber Group flying missions over Italy. They were on a bombing run to take out the railroad depot at Castelfranco Veneto on what would prove to be one of the most harrowing missions of the war.
The flak was heavy that day. The Germans were dug into the mountains, and they knew what they were doing. Sam remembered the sound - that peculiar cracking sound that flak made when it was close, like the sky itself was breaking apart.
The hit came without warning. One moment they were in formation at 20,000 feet, the next moment the aircraft took direct hits to the ball turret, bomb bay and radio room areas. The plane went into a steep dive and spin, then exploded with such force that it threw men out of the disintegrating bomber - some unconscious, some killed instantly.
Sam Wheeler was blown out of the cockpit. No time to think, no time to grab for anything. One second he was at the co-pilot's station, the next he was in open air, tumbling through space, the world spinning - sky, mountain, sky, mountain - and the wind so loud he couldn't hear himself screaming.
He didn't remember much about those first seconds of freefall. The mind does strange things when it knows it's about to die. And then something hit him.
For a moment he thought it was a piece of the aircraft - debris from the explosion, maybe part of the fuselage. But his hands, moving on pure instinct, found fabric. Canvas. Straps.
A packed parachute, tumbling through the air beside him. During the explosion that tore the B-17 apart, navigator Arthur Frechette's parachute had been ripped from his body, and somehow - by luck or providence or the sheer random chaos of the universe - it was falling through the same column of air as Sam Wheeler.
Sam grabbed it. His fingers, numb with cold and fear, found the straps. He pulled it to his chest, got his arms through the harness, fumbling with the buckles as the ground rushed up to meet him. He said he didn't think about how strange it was, didn't wonder where it had come from. There was no time for questions. There were only the parachute and the ground and the desperate need to get one between himself and the other.
He pulled the ripcord. The chute deployed. The harness bit into his shoulders and groin with brutal force, but he was slowing, the terrible acceleration of freefall giving way to the gentle swaying descent of a parachute. He was alive. Impossibly, incredibly alive.
The odds of it were astronomical. The parachute had to have been torn from Frechette's back at just the right moment, had to have been caught by the wind at just the right angle, had to have tumbled through the air on just the right trajectory to intersect with Sam's fall. A few feet in any direction and they would have missed each other. A second earlier or later and the parachute would have been out of reach.
But it happened. In the chaos and violence and random chance of war, one man's parachute found another man's hands.
Captured as a POW
Sam landed in a field. Germans found him within an hour. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, but he survived. He came home. He married his wife Betty, had children, built a career in the Air Force, and became the man I knew steady, soft-spoken, kind, always the Southern gentleman, Sam Wheeler.
The Rest of the Crew
The crew of B-17 aircraft 44-6652 on that December day consisted of 10 men. When the aircraft exploded over the Initial point at 20,000 feet, their fates diverged in the most dramatic and final of ways.
Pilot: First Lieutenant Lyle Pearson – Prisoner of War
Co-Pilot: First Lieutenant Samuel Wheeler – Prisoner of War
Bombardier: First Lieutenant William Ferguson – Prisoner of War
Navigator: Second Lieutenant Arthur Frechette – Prisoner of War
Flight Engineer/Turret Gunner: Sergeant Farrell Haney – Killed in Action
Radar Operator/Gunner: Staff Sergeant Robert Halstein – Missing in Action
Lower Turret Gunner: Staff Sergeant Charles Williams – Killed in Action
Waist Gunner: Staff Sergeant Mitchell Vuyanovich – Killed in Action
Waist Gunner: Sergeant Charles Lyon – Prisoner of War
Tail Gunner: Sergeant Grant Dory – Prisoner of War
Six men survived and were taken prisoner. Four men perished or were never found.
But perhaps the most remarkable survival story of all belonged to Frechette, the navigator whose parachute had saved Sam Wheeler's life. He fell without a parachute from 20,000 feet.
He should have died. The mathematics are simple and brutal: a human body falling from that altitude reaches terminal velocity and impacts the ground with unsurvivable force. But Frechette fell onto a steep, snow-covered mountain slope. The deep snow cushioned his impact just enough that he survived, though he suffered multiple broken bones - broken legs, arms and ribs. Despite his severe injuries, Frechette was found by German forces and taken prisoner, where he received medical treatment and eventually recovered.
Two men, two impossible survivals, connected by a single parachute torn loose in an explosion four miles above the Italian countryside.
The story of Sam Wheeler catching Arthur Frechette's parachute in mid-air made its way into Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that chronicled the war for American servicemen. The paper documented Wheeler's parachute catches as "one of the more unusual" occurrences of the war - a masterpiece of understatement that somehow captured both the matter-of-fact tone of military reporting and the absolute improbability of what had happened in the sky over Italy that December day.
Prisoner of War
Sam Wheeler's war was far from over when he hit the ground in Italy. Within an hour of landing, he was captured by German forces. He was first held in Austria, then transferred to a prisoner of war camp in Germany, where he would remain until the war's end in May 1945.
As an Army Air Force officer, Sam was held in a Luftwaffe-run camp. The German air force maintained separate custody of Allied airmen, reportedly reflecting Hermann Göring's desire to provide favored treatment for captured fliers in hopes of obtaining preferential treatment for Luftwaffe personnel captured by the Allies. While conditions were harsh, the Luftwaffe camps generally adhered to the Geneva Convention more closely than Wehrmacht-run camps.
Life as a POW was an exercise in deprivation and endurance. Food was scarce, with German-issued rations insufficient to maintain life in a normally active person. Red Cross food parcels, delivered weekly when transportation allowed, made the difference between subsistence and starvation. Mail from home was irregular and heavily delayed, arriving months after it was sent, if it arrived at all. The cold was constant, and the monotony of captivity wore on the men.
Yet despite the hardships, morale among the American prisoners remained remarkably high. They were alive, they were together, and they knew that somewhere beyond the wire, their countrymen were fighting to reach them. Health among the POWs was generally good, with only minor outbreaks of skin infections caused by infrequent bathing and unbalanced diet. Medical treatment for wounded prisoners was prompt and efficient at capture, though many were neglected in transit, arriving at permanent camps with dressings and bandages weeks old.
Sam Wheeler endured his captivity with the same quiet strength that would characterize the rest of his life, waiting for liberation and the chance to go home.
After the War
When the war ended and Sam Wheeler finally returned home, he continued his career with the Air Force, eventually retiring as a lieutenant colonel before transitioning to civilian service. His post-war career took him to Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, where he worked as a civilian personnel specialist, bringing the same dedication to peacetime administration that he had brought to wartime service.
The Air Force sent him overseas again, this time to Yokota Air Base in Japan, where he served as chief of the civilian pay classification section, and later to Osan in South Korea, where he spent his final two years overseas as the civilian personnel officer. It was there where I came to know him, where he was my boss and mentor, though I didn't know then what he had survived.
Sam threw himself into his work with characteristic thoroughness. As civilian personnel officer, he took a particular interest in mentoring the Korean employees who worked on the base. He encouraged all the office's Korean employees to speak English as much as possible, and he took a couple of them under his wing to teach them English personally. He understood what it meant to be far from home, to navigate a foreign culture, to find your place in an unfamiliar world.
I think about Sam sometimes, about the man I knew and the young co-pilot I never met, the one who reached out in the freezing air at 20,000 feet and caught a tumbling parachute. I think about how he never mentioned it, never used it to define himself, never traded on it for respect or admiration. He was just Sam Wheeler, my boss, a quiet man who did his job well and helped others do theirs.
But on Dec. 29, 1944, in the sky over Castelfranco Veneto, Italy, Sam Wheeler did something that shouldn't have been possible. He fell without a parachute, found one while freefalling and lived. And then he came home, went back to work, collected Korean chests, mentored young employees and lived a life of quiet service until the end.
That's the story of Sam Wheeler, the co-pilot who caught a parachute. The man who never talked about the war.