Tag: POW

This time, he had to wait for her—14 long years.

Her wait for him in 1945 may have been shorter, but it was terrifying.

When I interviewed Jerry and Nancy Gleesing in March 2010, they were looking forward to celebrating their 66th anniversary in June.

They’d met in LaMoure, North Dakota, in 1940. Four years later, the high school sweethearts married.

They used Jerry’s two-week leave from the Army Air Force for their honeymoon. When he received orders to deploy to Italy as a flight officer with the 15th Air Force, 459th Bomb Group, Nancy was expecting their first child.

On Jan. 15, 1945, his B-24 was shot down, and he and his crew bailed out over Hungary. It was only his second mission.

 During the interview, Jerry laughed as he described his predicament.

“We never learned how to bail out, just how to fly the plane!”

But he grew somber when recalling how locals armed with pickaxes and shovels quickly surrounded him and his crew.

“I thought they were going to kill us,” he said.

Instead, the captives were handed over to the Germans and taken to a prisoner of war camp in Moosburg, Germany.

Meanwhile, back in North Dakota, Nancy worried.

“The letters stopped on Jan. 5,” she said.

For 10 days, there was no word. Then, a telegram arrived, reporting Jerry as missing in action.

As he was being processed at the POW camp, a guard pointed to his wedding ring and motioned for him to remove it. And that’s where Jerry drew the line.

“You get to the point where the initial fear is gone,” he said. “Whatever happens, happens. I didn’t give up my wedding ring. I said, ‘I vowed to never take it off. I’m not taking it off.’”

The guard let him keep it.

In February 1945, Nancy gave birth to a daughter she wasn’t sure her husband would get to meet. But in April, after 3 ½ months as a prisoner of war, the camp at Moosburg was liberated.

“We saw the tanks come over the hill,” Jerry recalled. “Everyone was whooping and hollering. Then the American flag was raised, and it was dead silent.” His voice broke. “It was like coming home.”

And come home he did, just in time to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. He and Nancy raised seven children together.

Their story ran in the newspaper on March 25, 2010. A month later, Jerry died suddenly.

They didn’t get to celebrate their 66th anniversary, but their story stayed with me. In fact, it became chapter one of “War Bonds: Love Stories from the Greatest Generation.”

Since its 2015 publication, I’ve done approximately 100 reading, signing and speaking events and I’ve shared the Gleesings’ story at most of them.

No matter how many times I’ve told it, I can’t get through a reading without tearing up when I share Jerry’s reaction to seeing the American flag raised in that POW camp.

Their chapter ends with him looking at the wedding band he’d refused to remove.

 “It’s still there,” he said. “I’ve never taken it off.”

On Dec. 1, 2024, Nancy died at the age of 100, and his long wait ended.

Something tells me this reunion was even better than the one they had in 1945.

Following Jerry’s death, Nancy had worn his wedding ring on a chain around her neck. I like to think that when Jerry reached out to welcome her, she took his hand and slipped that thin gold band back where it belonged.