Old Missoula

Flier’s WWII experiences are a story for the ages

By Sanjay Talwani – Helena Independent Record Nov. 11, 2011

HELENA — Wayne Eveland did a lot as an Army Air Corps airman in World War II.

He earned a Distinguished Flying Cross for airlifting refugees from Burma to India. He flew war supplies on new air routes in Africa. And he bailed out over occupied France, hiding in forests for days before connecting with the French Resistance, weeks later climbing over the Pyrenees Mountains in deep snow to reach Spain and relative safety.

He did all that in just three years, and didn’t talk a lot about it most of his life.

Despite that, his daughter, Nicole Keller, has edited and published his memoirs, drawn from stories that Eveland told on tape while riding on long car trips later in life with Lois, his wife and colleague in the insurance business. He died in 1999.

Lois, whom he married some years after the death of Dawn, his first wife and Keller’s mother, typed up the dictation. About three winters ago, sidelined from the ski hills by knee injury, Keller wove it all together, trying to make it a smooth narration in her father’s voice.

“I wanted it to sound like my dad talking to me, and it did,” she said.

The manuscript sat on a shelf for a while until Keller ran into a classmate who was an editor and publisher. The project gained new life and the first copies of “Hard Way Home” arrived last week.

It’s a wild story, launched in August 1939, when young Eveland was sworn in as a cadet with the Army Air Corps at Fort Missoula.

Eveland grew up in Missoula, but spent his high school years and some of college in Butte before transferring to the University of Montana.

Like most people of his generation, he clearly remembered where he was when he heard of the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. He was in Trinidad, about to board a flight for Africa, part of a group of Army Air Corps flyers working for Pan American Airways, ostensibly to develop air routes in Africa, but more accurately to help the British war effort against Italy.

In several months in Africa, soldiers battled malaria, checked for tarantulas and flew to cities and outposts across the continent.

Then one day, the announcement came that Pan Am needed them in eastern India, near the border with Burma, and off they went from Accra, in current-day Ghana — via Cairo, Basra, Karachi, and Calcutta.

He then had to fly DC-3-type aircraft through the Himalayas to Burma, ferrying fuel and supplies to the Flying Tigers, the American group flying with the Chinese Air Force.

They also rescued refugees.

On April 22, 1942, he hauled 74 people to safety on a plane built for about 24. He wove through the valleys and got them to India. The overloaded plane could only climb as high as 12,500 feet, and people vomited so much that it flowed into the cockpit area.

It was for that effort that he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. But it took more than 50 years, because technically he had been in the uniform of Pan Am, not the Army Air Corps. He received the cross finally at a ceremony in 1994, at age 77.

Keller said her father was especially proud that he received the honor for saving people.

Returning stateside, Eveland learned to fly the B-17, the “flying fortress” armed with about a dozen machine guns and up to 5,000 pounds of bombs. He was a squadron commander at the base in Glasgow (dealing, just before deployment to Europe, with an apparent saboteur among the crew) and then in the United Kingdom. While training in Montana, the B-17s from various bases would convene and practice flying in formation.

He made bombing runs into occupied France. But, on Dec. 31, 1943, aiming for an airfield in Bordeaux, in southwest France, he was shot down. A German fighter tried to hit him with gunfire as he descended with his parachute, but he made it to earth, plunging at the end as tree branches took the loft out of his chute.

He dodged soldiers and dogs for days, hiding in forests and thickets and falling ill. On Jan. 12, 1943, the Army sent his wife, Dawn, a telegram that he was missing in action over France.

Eventually, he connected with members of the Resistance, who moved him and hid him. In one train car, he dressed as a Frenchman to avoid capture. He hid under rugs and was smuggled in a wine truck.

Eventually, he was turned over to Basque smugglers, who escorted a group over the Pyrenees into Spain, a neutral nation in the conflict.

Eveland later likened it to going from Helena to Missoula, but without taking any roads. It was supposed to take 24 hours, but a storm rolled in and it took three days, with hip-deep snow in some cases. Some of the men lost hands or feet to frostbite.

Once at the British Embassy in Barcelona, Eveland wasn’t permitted to actually send a letter saying where he was, but he bought a leather-bound box and stuffed it with paper with the word “Barcelona” on it, and sent it to Dawn, so she would make the connection and know that he was alive.

Eveland returned to Montana, had a career in insurance and never flew another airplane.

Keller said the war affected him, like many of his era. He couldn’t put up with symphony music. Trying to hide in occupied France, in particular, took a physical and mental toll, she said.

Years later, around 1970, Keller and her husband, Keith, ventured into a town where a family with the Resistance sheltered Eveland for an entire month with one Gustave Souillac and family.

Eveland had remembered the address, and Nicole and Keith ventured to it and rang the doorbell. It was answered by Souillac’s widow, who remembered Eveland from among the couple of dozen fliers that they sheltered.

“It was nice to be able to thank them after all these years,” Keller said.

Keller said she put the book together for family members, who had always heard bits and pieces of Eveland’s adventures. Among her grandchildren is a 3-year-old boy who already loves airplanes.

The book is dedicated to Lois, who helped coax the words out of Eveland.

 

For further reading about Colonel Wayne Eveland see The Young Ones: American Airmen of WW II by Erik Dyreborg (2003). Eveland discusses his life prior to WW2, including a stint at the School of Mines in Butte, and University of Montana in Missoula where he was from.