“Scars are not signs of weakness, they are signs of survival and endurance.” Rodney Winters
January 23, 1945 – Neuss, Germany: Fred Gonzales woke early that morning, excited to be flying his 25th and final mission. He would be the lead pilot in a bombing run on a railroad depot near Dusseldorf, Germany. Six hours later, the 23-year-old 1st Lieutenant’s B-17 Bomber had just released its bombs from 27,000 feet when German antiaircraft fire blew off half of the plane’s right wing.
Fred turned and yelled to his co-pilot, “Well, I guess this is it,” only to discover that he was dead. Fred frantically shouted the bail-out orders to the rest of the crew. About that time, the plane rolled over and began a flat spin. Hanging upside down, he desperately groped for his parachute but had no luck before blacking out.
The bomber crashed in a field killing the nine crew members but somehow Fred survived. When he awoke, he was crumpled on the ground beneath the cockpit in excruciating pain. His attention was drawn to a broken window in the cockpit and a farmer cussing and pointing a pistol at him. He laughed, aware of the irony of surviving a five-mile fall, only to be shot by an angry farmer.
Federico Gonzales, the son of Mexican immigrants, had grown up in San Antonio, Texas. His father ran a small barbeque stand and struggled to support the family. Eight-year-old Fred saw his first Boeing P-26 fighter aircraft at Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio and knew he wanted to be a pilot.
When World War II began, he was at the front of the line to join the Air Force and fly fighters. The Air Force, however, needed bomber pilots and Fred was assigned 25 missions in the B-17 before he could sit in the cockpit of the hot new P-51 Mustang fighter.
A year before the fateful 25th mission over Dusseldorf, Fred had won the Distinguished Flying Cross after being shot down in Belgium. On that mission, he lost two of his four engines and his radio, had the wings and tail shot up, and had a serious fuel leak, but Fred had managed to avoid ditching his bomber in the frigid North Sea and landed on a small airfield in Belgium as he ran out of fuel.
On that cold, snowy morning in January 1945, the farmer’s pistol misfired. Soon, a German officer arrived, tossed Fred’s broken body into a truck, and took him to a POW camp. A surgeon used piano wires and multiple casts to set Fred’s broken arms, legs, ribs, and shattered feet.
His skull and spine were the only bones not broken. Three months later when the war ended and the camp was liberated, Fred’s injuries had begun to heal. However, it would take two years and countless surgeries before he could walk again.
The five-mile fall had broken Fred’s body, but not his spirit. He never let his injuries stop him. His miraculous survival resulted in a deep gratitude and an intensity to live his life to the fullest. Along the journey, he and his wife raised seven boys, and Fred taught them his first rule of survival: to believe that anything is possible. He learned to sing, play the piano, carve model planes out of wood, was a photographer with his own dark room, and made beautiful clay pottery.
Because of his injuries, Fred had to abandon his dream of being a career pilot. Despite the disappointment, with indefatigable optimism, he began to rebuild his life. He shifted his interest to biology and earned a BS from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. He then attended St. Louis University, where in 1951 he earned a master’s in biology and a PhD in biophysics two years later.
Dr. Gonzales taught in Texas before joining the Northwestern medical school faculty as a professor of anatomy in 1963 where he taught cell and molecular biology. Fred Gonzales remained on the medical staff until age 80. He died at 85, in Evanston, Illinois, more than 60 years after miraculously surviving a fall of five miles.
“I learned several lessons from being shot down,” Fred reflected on his WWII experiences. “We are going to die when we are supposed to die and I learned the hard way the difference between being alive and truly living.”
Beautiful story. Thanks