Humanoid
Gallery
Irwin Stovroff: The Lucky Bombardier
Story
by Gary
Greenberg
Photo
by Mike Price
Courtesy
of Boca
Raton Magazine

September 2001--Irwin
Stovroff has a collection of war mementos in
the office of his Boca Raton home – pictures, documents,
medals – but none more striking than
a framed photograph of his glass-nosed bomber being shot down behind
enemy lines.
Snapped by a crew member of another
plane, the picture
shows Stovroff’s B-24 Liberator trailing smoke from its two
starboard engines as it
heads into a nosedive, while far below, the tiny white dots of ten
parachutes flutter
to earth.
“As I floated down, I thought,
‘What the hell is
going to happen to me now?’” recalls the former
bombardier. “We landed right in the German
front lines.
“Being Jewish, I threw my dog
tags away immediately,
a good thing because we were all rounded up in no time. They marched us
into a cemetery,
but the commanding officer wouldn’t let them shoot us. Why? I
still don’t
know.”
Instead, they were taken to an
interrogation center,
held in isolation and grilled one-by-one.
“After a few days, this SS
officer comes in and
says he knows everything about me: who my father is and
mother’s maiden name, the street where
I live, my elementary school, the girl I dated in high
school…” Stovroff says.
“I asked how he knew so much and he replied, ‘I
once lived a few blocks away from
you. You used to be my paperboy. I’ll do what I can to help
you.’”
Stovroff’s former neighbor in
Buffalo, N.Y., had
moved back to Germany
before the war broke out. And he might have saved his old
paperboy’s
life by putting a question mark next to Stovroff’s
identification as a Jew
on his prisoner of war ID document.
Instead of a concentration camp,
Lieutenant Stovroff
wound up at a German stalag for officers, still no picnic.
“We would have starved
if not for the American Red Cross,” he notes.
He spent about a year there before
being liberated by Russian Cossacks, who rode into the prison camp on
horseback
with rifles blazing.
Stovroff has a lot of stories, and he
tells them
with enthusiasm, humor and just a touch of pathos – like the
time his squadron was attacked by
newfangled German jets over the Baltic Sea.
“These things without props
came out of nowhere
and shot down fifteen of our planes,” he says, shaking his
head. “No one had ever seen anything
like it. One hundred and fifty men...all lost.
“After we completed our
mission, I decided that
I wasn’t going back up no matter what they did to me. But
they gave us a couple days off and
we went to London and got drunk and chased girls. By the time the two
days were
up, we came back saying, ‘Ah, what the
heck.’”
Stovroff went on to fly thirty-five
missions, ironically
being shot down on the one that was scheduled to be his last.
“We had our bags packed to go
home and were envisioning
parades,” he now says with a chuckle. “Instead we
ended up in a prison camp.”
After his long overdue return
home, Stovroff
married, had three kids and spent forty years working for Thomasville
Furniture, advancing to international sales manager. The outgoing,
energetic, natural-born salesman was still
going strong at 75 when, much to his chagrin, the company retired
him.
Now in his 80s, Stovroff occupies a lot
of his time helping
those who can’t help themselves as the national service
officer for American Ex-Prisoners
of War. He volunteers three times a week at the Veteran’s
Administration Hospital
in West Palm Beach, helping ex-POWs fill out paperwork for pension,
medical
care and other benefits.
Last year, he was belatedly awarded a
prestigious
Distinguished Flying
Cross, which was pinned on his chest by a fellow ex-POW, Senator John
McCain. Like a lot of World War II vets, Irwin Stovroff says his
military experience
gave him a perspective of life that has helped him succeed as a
civilian.
“After being a POW, you figure
what worse can happen?”
he says. “It changes your whole attitude. No matter what
happens, you’ve already
hit bottom. There’s no place to go but up.”
Next: Ralph
Shear: Invincible Infantryman
Humanoid Gallery
Reading Room
Outer
Space Art Gallery