Lloyd Kilmer was eight years old in 1929, when his father lost the family’s southern Minnesota dairy farm at the onset of The Great Depression. Young Kilmer scrambled to find work wherever he could; selling newspapers, bagging groceries at the local grocery, and operating the projector at the movie theater in Stewartville, Minn.
The eldest of five sons, Lloyd was the first in his family to graduate from high school. At the age of 18, he was working as a bellhop at a hotel in nearby Rochester, Minnesota when World War II broke out in 1939. Never having flown in an airplane, Kilmer was determined to enlist in the Army Air Corps, which he did on July 22, 1942. Within one year of the day that he first climbed into an airplane, he was flying combat missions over Europe.
Nearly two years later, on June 29, 1944, his sixteenth mission, Kilmer was on a bombing run over one of the four Nazi tank factories in Germany. As he approached his target his B-24 long-range heavy bomber–dubbed the Liberator–encountered heavy fire from German antiaircraft guns on the ground.
Kilmer recounts the harrowing experience, “One shell went through the wing, rupturing the gas tanks, disabling an engine, and starting a fire. Another burst knocked the propeller off an engine.” Even so, at just 24 years of age, Kilmer was confident his flight crew could make it back to base, or at least to the North Sea, where, if they jettisoned, they would be picked up by Allied forces.
That would not happen, however.
While the crew managed to put out the fires on the plane by going into a steep dive, they were losing too much fuel to make it to a safe zone. Kilmer was forced to crash-land in a potato field in the province of North Holland. While the crew all managed to survive the crash, without sustaining serious injuries, the Germans occupied the area and it wasn’t long before Kilmer and his crew were hunted down and interned as prisoners of war.
It was the beginning of an inhumane, round-the-clock, struggle for survival. His captors isolated Kilmer from the rest of his crew, which he was never allowed to see again.
For the next 10 months he was transported between two German POW camps. He was interrogated at gunpoint, deprived of sleep, locked in solitary confinement, witnessed other inmates being shot in attempts to escape, somehow managed to subsist on meals of watery cabbage or turnip soup, and spent bitter nights huddled under a thin blanket.
Kilmer worried about his family back home who didn’t know his whereabouts or that he had been captured.
Kilmer eventually found himself living in squalid conditions with 125,000 other prisoners at a German camp called Moosburg Stalag 7A, Germany’s largest prisoner of war camp. He had lost 60 pounds, his weight dropping below 100. He was emaciated and disordered.
Providentially, time was running out on Hitler and his embattled Reich, as massive Allied armies were quickly advancing on all fronts, pushing his beleaguered armies to the point of near collapse.
Then on Sunday morning April 29, 1945—a day before Adolf Hitler and his wife of 24 hours, Eva Braun, committed suicide in his bunker— Kilmer was attending a POW church service. The chaplain, a fellow American POW, abruptly stopped to listen to small-arms fire that had erupted on the outskirts of the camp. The men looked up to see low-flying aircraft and soon could heard the telltale rumbling of American tanks as they crashed through the double 10-foot wire fences that barricaded the internment camp.
Lloyd Kilmer’s nightmare was over.
As one can imagine, after such an exacting ordeal, scenes of the wildest rejoicing, tears, hugs and unconstrained celebration ensued.
To mark the liberation, the American rescuers went to a nearby church where the Nazi swastika was prominently displayed on a flag that hung from the steeple. Kilmer says the men of Stalag 7A fell quiet as the swastika was lowered and an American flag was raised in its place.
It became a defining moment in Lloyd Kilmer’s life.
Years later, after Kilmer had married his high school sweetheart and their two sons had charted their own course in life, he and his wife moved to Sun City West, a popular retirement community outside of Phoenix. Kilmer noticed that the main boulevard, leading to their community, displayed no flags on Independence Day.
Given Kilmer’s defining experience on that unforgettable day in April of 1945 outside Moosburg Stalag 7A, when the swastika came down and the American flag went up, Lloyd Kilmer has looked for the Stars and Stripes. One need only understand the symbolic significance in connection with his liberation.
Lloyd started a campaign to do something about R. H. Johnson Boulevard. “I devised a plan to attach an American flag to each of the hundred power poles along the boulevard,” he says. “It’s now known as the Boulevard of Flags.” Red, white, and blue American flags serve as reminders, sentinels along the thoroughfare. Every one of the flags veterans’ casket flags, representing a veteran who fought for our freedom.
The Boulevard of Flags was dedicated on Presidents Day 1989, Lloyd being honored for his role with the Patrick Henry Award for Patriotism, one of the highest awards of the American Legion; this in addition to his Purple Heart, POW Medal, American Theater Medal and many other decorations bestowed following the war.
There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of such stories that could be told of courageous men and women who have served and are serving our country.
“On this Veterans Day, let us remember the service of our veterans, and let us renew our national promise to fulfill our sacred obligations to our veterans and their families who have sacrificed so much so that we can live free.” –U.S. Representative Dan Lipinski, Illinois’s 3rd Congressional District.
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics.
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