Reading, Massachusetts

b. 1925

Dresden

Marcel's shoes were taken by civilians and then he was shipped to an interrogation center outside Frankfurt and thrown into an 8 x 10-foot cell.

A board for a bed.  A window leaking light, far beyond his reach.  A bucket toilet and one coffee can of cabbage soup per day.  Lines counting time scraped into the wall.  Marcel Boisvert, child of a house storming with seven brothers and sisters, sat in isolation for two days. But he didn't despair.  “I was defiant,” he says. “I was a cocky little bastard.”

They took him to an interrogation room.  A German officer sat at a table.  Another stood and two guards took their places behind Marcel.  The questions started about the tactics of strategic area bombing.  He shot back: name, rank, and serial number.  Hours went by.  The officer at the table told him in excellent, polite English: “We've got you listed as a spy.  We'll shoot you.”  Then they returned him to his cell and days passed in exactly the same manner as before.  The guards came again.

This time the officer at the table asked Marcel, with a worried tone in his voice: “Did you go to Dresden?  I had family in Dresden.”

Dresden, where Allied planes dropped 3,907 tons of bombs and incendiary devices, killing between 50,000 and 100,000 people.  Where, for days afterward, bonfires of bodies lit the night sky.  Did he go to Dresden? 

Marcel thought so, that had been the mission objective.  But sometimes planes were diverted or lost their way.  They could have dropped their load on a secondary target or a “target of opportunity.”  A tail gunner didn't really know what happened in the cockpit.  He lived backwards in a world of deadly fireworks, of fighter planes lurking in clouds, of sky slipping away.  And then the pandemonium of their bailout, the long drop to earth.  The German civilians yelling, “Terrorflieger!”   But yes, that was the target at the daily briefing, Dresden.

“I don't know,” Marcel replied.  

Later they took him outside and showed him three tall posts in the ground.  “This,” said the polite officer, “is where you're going to be shot tomorrow.” Then they threw him back in his cell.