Saline MI
10-15-2015 10:50am

Saline's Carl Weller Pens Book About WWII POW Experience

Carl Weller is well known to many Salinians as the owner of Wellers on Michigan Avenue, the event hosting business created in the historic Schuler Mill built in 1845. Fewer know of his heroic actions as a waist gunner in a B-17 during World War II and his time as a POW.

Like the majority of returning WWII vets, Weller chose to push memories of the war out of his head and seldom talked about it. Recently, however, he has chosen to let the world know his experiences.

He has published a book called “For You the War is Over,” with the help of retired EMU English professor, Jeff Duncan. The title comes the phrase recited to him in a heavy German accent by a soldier pointing a gun at him after he parachuted from a crippled B-17 over France.

Last Sunday, Weller shared his experiences at the Saline District Library to a small but appreciative crowd. Most of the group had connections with the Saline Historical Society.

Weller sought to join the war effort while still attending high school in Detroit. His parents were not in favor of his enlisting so he waited until he was drafted.

They sent him to Fort Custer near Kalamazoo to report for duty. There he successfully requested to be assigned to the Air Force.

He did boot camp in Atlantic City, New Jersey, followed by more specific training in Denver and other western sites. He couldn’t pass his gunnery training until he could take apart and reassemble his gun – with gloves on – in the dark.

Ironically, Weller and his B-17 crew were sent to England on a boat. It took weeks to get there while avoiding German submarines. When they detected the presence of a submarine they would have to shut down engines and maintain absolute silence until the threat went away.

They arrived just in time to participate in the D-day invasion. Weller’s first several missions were in support of the invasion, but his crew went on to participate in many kinds of bombing missions over France and Germany including carpet bombing of whole cities.

The mortality was very high for bomber crews. Many perished before completing the requisite number of missions.

Weller broke the tension of the long flights to their targets by telling jokes and singing over the intercom. 

His crew completed 32 missions, but on August 13, 1944, on their 33rd mission, their luck ran out. The plane was fatally damaged by flack as they were attacking a military road in France.

Miraculously, all but two of the crew were able to parachute to the ground alive, even though some were badly injured and they had not been trained in how to bail out. But it was then that the greater challenge began.

For 9 months, Weller was a POW. In prison camp he slept on the floor underneath a triple-decker bunk bed. Only two GIs were able to escape past the double fences and barbed wire, but they were shot dead and their bodies displayed as a warning to others.

In Weller’s barracks someone had been able to smuggle in a crystal radio set. They listened to war news at night and transcribed it for others in the camp.

The news was uplifting for the prisoners since the Germans were losing at this stage of the war. The guards never discovered the radio.

In the later months of his imprisonment Weller and thousands of other GIs were forced to march hundreds of miles across the German countryside. Many did not make it.

The men had little to eat and starvation was an ever-present threat along with disease and the chance of being shot. Weller lost over 50 pounds.

The imprisonment ended when Germany surrendered to the allies, but many more trials awaited Weller before he was able to return to America.

Even after getting back, he found out he could not go home. According to the Air Force, he did not have enough points to be discharged, so he spent several more months at a base in Denver.

Weller’s verbal presentation differed in several details from the book, but overall it was amazingly consistent for a story of events that happened 70 years ago told by a nonagenarian. The self-published book is written in a casual unpretentious prose that holds the readers interest to the end.

Weller was known as a comedian among his crewmates and his sense of humor comes through in the book, tempering the horrors of war and imprisonment.

The book is available through Amazon and can be bought at Brewed Awakenings in Saline.

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