Robert Michelsen, b. 1925
Robert Michelsen was born 15 November
1925 in Minneapolis; he attended South High School, graduating in 1943. Soon
thereafter he volunteered for the US Army Air Corps, and after basic training
was sent to gunnery school. By mid-1944 he was training to be a crew member on a
B-29 Superfortress bomber. In April 1945 his 11-man crew, with Captain Dick
Mansfield, was stationed to the US Army Air Corps base at North Field, Guam (314th
Bomb Wing, 29th Bomb Group),
from where missions were launched against mainland Japan. The
Mansfield crew flew ten
missions over the next six weeks, striking urban areas as well as military
targets.
On
25 May 1945 the Mansfield crew took off in the Arkansas Traveler
(aircraft number
44-69728),
part of
a 500-plane mission to Tokyo. Loaded with incendiary bombs, the B-29
was beginning her final bomb run when she was hit by Japanese
ground fire; with the plane going down, the crew was forced to bail out
over
Tokyo. Bob was captured as soon as he hit the ground, blindfolded and
beaten,
then taken to a nearby detention facility.
Over
the next three months, until the end of the war, Bob and scores of other
captured B-29 crew members were prisoners of the Japanese kempetai secret
police; they were imprisoned at this facility in small cells,
where they endured interrogations, physical and mental torture, sickness, and
starvation diets. They were kept separate from other Allied POW’s, for the Japanese
did not consider them normal military prisoners but rather, because of the
nature of their missions against civilian targets, war criminals--and thus not
deserving of human treatment. Only in mid-August 1945 were Bob and the other
surviving internees from his prison taken to a regular POW camp, Omori, which soon thereafter was
liberated by American forces. Bob spent many months in hospitals recovering from
his ordeal, finally being discharged in May 1946 from Hines VA Hospital in
Illinois.
After
the military Bob attended Augsburg College in Minneapolis, graduating in 1950;
he then spent several years in Montana before returning to the Twin Cities in
the mid-1950s to get married and raise a family. He worked many years for the
publisher W B Saunders, retiring in 1985.
Biographical
information and all interview content © Thomas Saylor, 2001-02
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