World War II
My father, Roy Benson, was born in 1879 in Centerfield, New York, and my mother, Frances Lorraine Gulvin, was born in 1880 in Sittingbourne, England which is about fifty miles southeast of London. Sittingbourne is approximately thirty miles from Rochester, England. She came to...
After a few days at Camp Kilmer we were moved out to board ship in the middle of the night. All I can remember is going up a very wide gangplank into a big black opening about 2...
5. Chapter 5I entered the service on April 15, 1942. We left early in the morning from the railroad depot in Canandaigua for Rochester where we went through the induction center on State St...
8. Chapter 8We arrived at Stalag Luft III (which means camp air) toward the end of May, 1944. It was located about 100 miles Southeast of Berlin near the town of Saigon. it consisted of sev...
1. Chapter 1My father, Roy Benson, was born in 1879 in Centerfield, New York, and my mother, Frances Lorraine Gulvin, was born in 1880 in Sittingbourne, England which is about fifty miles s...
2. Chapter 2My older brothers were always interested in the Bristol Hills and around 1927 they rented a small house on the Egypt Valley Road which we called a cabin. It had a kitchen, livin...
13. Chapter 13When we arrived at Camp Dix the first thing we did was go single file through a room for a medical checkup. A doctor was standing there and asked "how do you feel?" I said 'Okay...
4. Chapter 4During the summer of 1936 I tried working as a grocery clerk on Main Street. The people who traded there were mostly Italians and most spoke very little English, so I couldn't u...
9. Chapter 9There were about lO,OOO British and American POW's who gradually left the compound. We formed a line down the road to the southwest through the pine forest, in the cold, as the...
7. Chapter 7At seven O'clock on the evening of May 11 we were called for a short mission to France. This was my twenty third mission my army records show that I flew thirty seven missions....
12. Chapter 12The rifle fire soon ceased and we were all running around the camp excited and yelling. It was just eight days less than a year that I had been held prisoner and, as happy as I...
3. Chapter 3I started school in 1923 and went to the Adelaide Avenue School for grades 1 to 3. I attended the old Union School, where the YMCA is now located, for grades 4 through 8. I atte...
10. Chapter 10On April 4 we began marching to the southeast away from the advancing Americans. It would have been nice to wait there for liberation, but the Germans had different ideas. At le...
11. Chapter 11Stallag VII-A at Moosburg was a very large camp as prisoners were moved here from al1 the other prison camps to keep them from being liberated. We found some of the men here who...