r/u_USAAFoverPOLAND

Missions to Blechhammer are commemorated in an excellent private museum, run by the Blechhammer-1944 Association. It is located in a WWII-era air raid bunker, walking distance to the Blechhammer North complex, in Kedzierzyn-Kozle, Poland.
The missions, the factories, slave labor and POW camps are presented in much detail, and you can see a lot of historical artifacts there.
I have been working with this group since 2000. Back then, they had a lot of info about American crash sites, but could not link them to any particular aircraft. I had a lot of archival documents, but did not know where exactly the American planes went down. This, and the fact they are good people, made it a natural collaboration and friendship between us.

Check their Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/share/18pZ6HK16M/?mibextid=wwXIfr

And subscribe to my substack, and find out more stories about the USAAF over Poland.

https://substack.com/@usaafoverpoland

This Memorial Weekend will be very special to me.

I have been supporting for 25+ years the US government efforts to recover WWII MIAs from Poland, and imagine this!!!

Yesterday, one of the identified MIAs from Poland was reburied in Omaha, Nebraska (8 MIAs in his crew, 5 were identified and returned to families in the last 10 years, and I gave my humble contribution to this effort).

And, TODAY!!!, an airman from another crew shot down over Politz (today Police, Poland) is buried in Praire du Rocher, Illinois! There were four MIAs in his crew, allegedly buried in one grave. We passed this information to the US government years ago, they worked with my friends from Szczecin, found the grave, and the identification process was finished on two men.

I will write more about each airman on the Memorial Weekend.

Meanwhile, the second part of my In The Air On The Air story is published on Substack.

Although I am linking plane names to songs and movies of the 1940s, this was a cruel war, and there were people dying on these planes, too.

My special thoughts go to Walter Shimshock (born Wladek Szymczak), who bailed out of the „I’ll Be Seeing You/‚Til We Meet Again”, landed safely near Warsaw, Poland, on September 18th 1944, and was brutally killed by German soldiers. Indeed, Til We Meet Again.

https://sserwatka.substack.com/p/in-the-air-and-on-the-air-part-2

The local community funded and maintain the memorial dedicated to this crew:

https://www.uswarmemorials.org/html/monument_details.php?SiteID=2728&MemID=3583

You will find more about American planes named after movies and songs in this story on Substack:

https://open.substack.com/pub/sserwatka/p/in-the-air-and-on-the-air-part-1

The Part 2 of this story (including the “I’ll be Seeing You”) is coming to my Substack on next Saturday, May 16th.

Photo: Joseph Cotten and Ginger Rogers in an ''I'll Be Seeing You'' (1944) press photo. Source: wikipedia